Chapter Forty

THE AUSTRALIANS DIDN’T pursue the Saracen, which was a mistake, but their mission was to find the three kidnapped civilians, not to chase a lone insurgent. As it turned out, though, in a night dogged by bad luck, there was one piece of overwhelming good fortune: because it was the Australian captain who had taken the round in the thigh, it meant that Lieutenant Keating was in command.

He was only twenty-six years old but he had already done one tour in the ’Ghan, so even at that age his face was full of years. He came from a little town called Cunnamulla – it’s mostly wheat country that far out west, on the edge of what Australians call the never-never, so hot that the locals claimed a pervert was a man who preferred women to beer – but some of the neighbours ran a few sheep so Keating knew from an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease what quicklime was used for.

That was why, when they finally made it into the kitchen and he saw the two discarded bags lying on the floor, he felt as if the ground was shifting under his feet. Quicklime was totally alien to that part of the world, and why would anyone have gone to the trouble of carrying it in? Not kidnappers, surely. He still believed the IEDs indicated that a high-value asset was being protected in the village, but he was no longer certain it was still alive. He immediately told his men to get their flashlights out and start looking for a grave or burial pit.

First they found the charred remains of the stone storage house, and it was while Keating was trying to work out what that meant that an urgent shout rang out.

It was one of the young grunts. Not bothering with his communication headset or correct procedure, he yelled to his mates: ‘I’ve found it – bring me a shovel. ’

Keating heard, and he and several of his men came running – carefully because of the threat of unexploded IEDs – to the area behind the headman’s house. One look at the freshly turned soil – deep and wide enough to contain God-knows-what, traces of lime scattered around – and Keating was in no mood for taking any chances.

‘Get back now! Everybody deploy to the LZ. Move! ’

One of the sergeants – like all the others, no idea what was going on – turned to Keating. ‘What about searching the remaining houses, boss? Might be more hostiles. ’

Keating shook his head. The elaborate IEDs and the fact that nobody had tried to nail the squad made him certain that the village’s only occupant had disappeared into the night. ‘No, Sarge – whatever it is, I think we’ve found it. ’

At the landing zone – the wounded being treated, the squad’s lone medic trying to get an IV into the captain’s arm – Keating immediately used the secure communications network to put a call through to their base.

The Medevac choppers were already on their way to uplift the wounded, and the base operator, two hundred miles away in an air-conditioned blockhouse, assumed the officer was calling to hurry them up and that pretty soon he’d start whining about how they were on the front line and all they needed was some goddamn support. Just like they always did.

But Keating cut through the guy’s bored update on the choppers and told him they needed a hazchem unit on the mountainside right now. Being the army – of course – that started a host of questions, requests for authorization and confusion about the chain of command. Keating knew it could go on for hours, so he yelled at the hapless operator: ‘We may have been exposed – are you listening? For all I know it’s nuclear. Certainly something serious. ’

Like the operator, Keating’s men – including the barely conscious captain – were stunned. For a moment even the rising wind seemed to be swallowed by the silence. Then the operator started speaking fast, telling him to hold on while he opened a host of channels so that Keating could go through the chain of command as fast as possible.

Keating hung up – he knew that losing the connection would galvanize them into even more hurried action: in the army – as in life – sometimes you had to create a crisis in order to get people’s attention. He didn’t believe it was nuclear, but his intuition told him they had stumbled on to something evil and he didn’t know any other way to convey the urgency. He’d already decided he was going to get his ass busted for overreacting, but what else could he do?

While the staff officers back at base spun into a whirlwind of activity, what none of them realized was that, if the captain hadn’t been shot, if Keating had grown up somewhere other than in the Australian west, had he not known the look and use of quicklime – if it hadn’t been for these things and a whole lot more – the team of men in spacesuits equipped with their inflatable silver dome and towers of Klieg lights would never have arrived in time.

As it was, their fleet of Chinook helicopters landed with less than an hour to spare – any delay would have meant the quicklime would have done its work and they would never have found the corner of one saddle blanket.