worked beautifully. In another way it didn’t work at all, because although I think Homer and Lee both managed to fire a few rounds they were too off balance and it had no effect on the chopper.
They piled back into the car and I accelerated gently away. The helicopter was now throwing enough light again for me to see the next bit of road. It was fairly straight, bit of a curve to the right a few hundred metres ahead. The helicopter was doing a tight circle so he could come back for the next round. I’d bought us a bit of time, if nothing else. I tried to go faster but we were driving in crazy swerving patterns, half the time because I didn’t know where the road went and half the time because I knew where it went but I didn’t want us to be shot.
‘Where is he?’ I yelled back over my shoulder at Homer.
‘Starting another run at us. Straight behind.’
‘Got any ideas?’
‘Not right off the top of my head, no.’
This all sounds like a calm intelligent conversation but it was done in jerks and bits and pieces as I slowed and accelerated and swerved and nearly stopped and zigzagged. I don’t know why we weren’t all carsick.
‘Here he comes,’ Jess yelled. ‘God this is exciting isn’t it?’
I looked at her in disbelief. Well, I didn’t actually look at her but in my head I did. I was running out of strategies. I didn’t plan to do this but at the last second my foot did it for me; I must have instinctively felt that it was a good idea. My foot went down on the accelerator, the ute hesitated for a long second, then took off. I guess twin-cabs don’t exactly have the power lift-off of a Porsche but this thing did get going at quite a rate. And that meant we were suddenly going flat out at a wall of darkness. It took me a second to remember I had headlights, another second to decide whether it was wise to use them, and another second to find the switch. I suppose it then took another quarter of a second for them to come on.
If I’m going to be strictly mathematical about this I’d have to add a few more units of time to register the fence coming up and then some more for my reflexes to start operating. When you panic, the reflexes are not as quick because they’re paralysed. By this time we were well and truly off the road, off the ground too I suspect, and although I finally got around to turning the wheel it was way too late. Jess let out a scream like Courtney when she got her first period. So much for her finding it all exciting. We hit the fence. ‘We don’t need the helicopter to kill us,’ I thought, ‘I’ll take care of the job all by myself An image of Chris appeared strongly in my mind.
The fence was not a great one, but it wasn’t too bad. I hate to think what might have happened if it had been freshly strung with hard lines of steel barbed wire. But this farmer knew his fence had a good few years in it yet and he wasn’t ready to update. So we thundered into it almost headfirst, as I hadn’t got far with turning the steering wheel, and we burst through into the paddock, dragging quantities of wire and droppers and a fence post or two.
We were bouncing hard in a fairly rough paddock. I snapped the headlights off but I’d seen that the paddock was quite open and seemed to go a long way. Now I had some room to manoeuvre, but if the paddock had the usual quota of cattle, logs, drink troughs, rabbit warrens and other hazards, I was fairly sure that I could find lots of ways yet to get into trouble. The helicopter’s light picked us up and I swerved violently to the left then back to the right. I flicked on the lights again, to get a glimpse of our future, but also to distract him. As I turned them off I thought I saw something. Well of course I saw something. Grass for example. But something else. I had a moment’s agony of indecision. I felt I couldn’t risk turning them on again. I had to trust my judgement and assume that I’d seen what I thought I saw.
CHAPTER 10
A spatter of bullets cut across the car. In the dark I couldn’t see them properly but I heard them above all the noise. The car shuddered and there were a couple of bangs on the roof. I hunched up and accelerated again. Someone swore in the back seat and I heard Jeremy say anxiously, ‘Did they get you?’ and Homer said, ‘No, don’t know how they missed.’
I was still thinking about what I’d seen in the far distance in the headlights. Just that glimpse. The huge pylons they use for high-tension wires, the ones that march across the country like giant soldiers. If it hadn’t been an illusion, and if the pilot hadn’t seen them, if I could somehow guide him into them… well, put it this way, if I couldn’t, we had no hope.
I had to reverse our roles. I had to become the fox, making the chook do what I wanted. Somehow I had to get him turning, and watching me, so that he didn’t notice the wires. And that’s still assuming the wires were there. I had serious doubts about that. You can see anything at night, and maybe I’d been looking at a big gum tree. Or a giant kangaroo.
I couldn’t turn my headlights on again, because if the pylon was there, I would just illuminate it for him. Based on my glimpse, I figured it was about two hundred and fifty metres ahead, but since then we’d probably halved that distance. So we were getting pretty close.
The helicopter had banked sharply and was coming in from my right. I started to veer left, and at the same time called to Homer in the backseat: ‘When I stop, can you and Lee both jump out and run back the way we’ve been coming?’ I wanted to distract the pilot, give him lots to think about. I expected that he would still follow the car, but would keep an eye on the boys, wondering what was going on, trying to see where they were heading, and that would keep him glancing to the left.
I braked pretty hard. As the car doors opened the helicopter came throbbing overhead. It was so close and so loud and so menacing that I felt deafened. The car rocked in the down draught. I heard more firing, but I think he missed completely, probably because he wasn’t expecting me to stop.
I only gave the boys a second, and then took off again. I had to let him know that the car was still moving, that we hadn’t abandoned it, so we would be his first target. I started to do a big circle, hoping I hadn’t underestimated the distance. If the pylons were another hundred or more metres away, this wasn’t going to work. And I wouldn’t get another chance.
In fact, I’d done the opposite, and a pylon loomed up so suddenly that Jess and I both screamed. It looked like a huge robot, standing in the field. A visitor from another place, from out in the far distant universe. I had to pull the wheel back the other way to miss it, and at about that same moment the helicopter hit the wires. If we’d hit the pylon we might have been electrocuted.
And there in that dark lonely paddock, we had Guy Fawkes night, the Fourth of July, Commemoration Day, and the opening and closing of the Olympics, all in one. The helicopter turned into flowers of light, scorching my eyeballs. I saw at least half-a-dozen fireballs, going off quite slowly, each in different directions. So many sparks came out of the wires that it was like a Niagara Falls of fire. The helicopter lit up inside, and for a moment I could see everyone and everything. Three men, each sitting in their different positions, glowing bright with fire and electricity.
It dropped the short distance to the ground. We were about eighty metres away, and by then it was on my right again, because of the turn I’d done, so I saw it explode. And I heard it, and I felt the ground rock, and the car being buffeted by a huge wind and rockets of fire shooting at me, and the next thing, I’m getting picked up and tipped over like a giant hand has grabbed the car, and I’m suddenly looking down on Jeremy, feeling as though I’m at a great height above him.
Of course I wasn’t at a great height, just the usual distance, but you don’t expect to be in that position. Once again the good old safety belts helped. It took me a long moment to realise that the car had been turned on its side. I didn’t have much of a view any more, but there were still streaks of fire going past the ute, and I could see grass burning about twenty metres away.
I spared a thought for Homer and Lee. I had no idea that I was dropping them into an inferno, and I hoped they had survived. I wondered how anyone could. There were whooshing and zinging noises, which I realised were pieces of metal from the helicopter flying past us like rockets.
By the time the three of us crawled out of the ute, most of it was over. Four different grass fires were spreading, in different parts of the paddock, and the helicopter was burning brightly, with black smoke coming from it. I guess it had a lot of plastic and toxic parts. There was no use looking for survivors in that. They’d had no chance. And just as I was wondering about survivors, Homer and Lee came running towards us.
They were both a bit hysterical. They were kind of laughing and babbling, but not in a normal way. I
