a tow truck, with a couple of soldiers on the
back riding shotgun. We wriggled into a better position to watch as
the tow truck reached the van and began a three point turn that
ended up as a six-point turn in the narrow road.
When it was in position in front of the van
everybody got out: the two soldiers, and two men from the cab who
were dressed in oil-stained overalls and carried little bags. They
looked like mechanics always look: I think it’s the way mechanics
slouch that gives them their special look. The soldiers went for a
bit of a prowl, walking along the road one way, then the other,
while the mechanics started poking round in the engine of the
van.
But the interesting thing was that nobody
thought to look in the back section.
After half an hour, when the mechanics had
tried and failed many times to start the van, they hooked it up to
the tow truck. A soldier got in the driver’s seat to steer, and
away they went.
They still hadn’t looked in the back.
We couldn’t wait to get back to Fi and Kevin,
who were spying on the base, to find out what had happened when the
tow truck got to Cobbler’s Bay.
Chapter Ten
Yeah, they just went straight through,’ Kevin
said.
‘You sure?’ I asked.
‘No, I was asleep; what do you bloody think?’
Kevin lost his temper, as he did quite often these days. He’d been
through a lot, I kept reminding myself. So had we, but maybe what
he’d been through was worse than what we’d been through. Or maybe
he couldn’t cope with it as well as we did. That was no shame,
everyone’s different; it was just hard to imagine anyone coping
with it worse than me, because I don’t think I coped with it well
at all.
‘They went straight through,’ Fi said quietly.
‘When they got to the barrier they gave a wave to the bloke on duty
and he lifted it. They towed it to that big shed on the right; the
one with the petrol thingies outside. We think that’s a maintenance
shed for vehicles, and the one next to it’s a generator shed.’
‘So that’s a way we might be able to get in,’
Homer said thoughtfully.
‘We can’t wait six months for a truck to
conveniently break down,’ Lee said.
‘We could maybe make one break down,’ Robyn
said. ‘Couldn’t we?’
‘How?’
Three of us asked that question at once and no
one had an answer. A flat tyre wouldn’t be enough and it was hard
to think of any other possibility. Still, it was maybe a step
forward.
I took Kevin out to look for explosives. We
might have to make a proper bomb this time and, according to Jock,
we’d be able to find plenty of ingredients in sheds and farm
buildings. I hoped he was right and I hoped he was wrong. If he
were wrong, we might then have an excuse to call this crazy thing
off. It seemed to be building up so quickly into an enormous
operation. I’m sure heroes don’t go around thinking: Hope I can
find a good excuse to get out of this. I wanted to be a hero but
never seemed to quite get it right.
We wandered out into a different part of the
country. There weren’t so many colonists in this area yet; there
were still a number of empty houses. Only the best places were
occupied. It was easy to tell which were in use, and to give them a
wide berth. The good thing was that a lot of clearing had been
going on right through this district before the war, and that made
it a certainty that there’d been a lot of blasting. Cockies love
messing with explosives, and any big stubborn tree stump was a good
enough excuse. It’s amazing that there aren’t thousands of farmers
walking round with only half their fingers, but I never heard of
anyone blowing himself up. Dad had a few goes with gelignite when I
was younger but Mum talked him into giving it a miss. I wished now
that he’d taught me how to use it, and then, remembering that I was
meant to be looking for excuses, was glad he hadn’t.
We had a mixed morning. The first farm had
nothing, the second had a dozen bags of ammonium nitrate
back riding shotgun. We wriggled into a better position to watch as
the tow truck reached the van and began a three point turn that
ended up as a six-point turn in the narrow road.
When it was in position in front of the van
everybody got out: the two soldiers, and two men from the cab who
were dressed in oil-stained overalls and carried little bags. They
looked like mechanics always look: I think it’s the way mechanics
slouch that gives them their special look. The soldiers went for a
bit of a prowl, walking along the road one way, then the other,
while the mechanics started poking round in the engine of the
van.
But the interesting thing was that nobody
thought to look in the back section.
After half an hour, when the mechanics had
tried and failed many times to start the van, they hooked it up to
the tow truck. A soldier got in the driver’s seat to steer, and
away they went.
They still hadn’t looked in the back.
We couldn’t wait to get back to Fi and Kevin,
who were spying on the base, to find out what had happened when the
tow truck got to Cobbler’s Bay.
Chapter Ten
Yeah, they just went straight through,’ Kevin
said.
‘You sure?’ I asked.
‘No, I was asleep; what do you bloody think?’
Kevin lost his temper, as he did quite often these days. He’d been
through a lot, I kept reminding myself. So had we, but maybe what
he’d been through was worse than what we’d been through. Or maybe
he couldn’t cope with it as well as we did. That was no shame,
everyone’s different; it was just hard to imagine anyone coping
with it worse than me, because I don’t think I coped with it well
at all.
‘They went straight through,’ Fi said quietly.
‘When they got to the barrier they gave a wave to the bloke on duty
and he lifted it. They towed it to that big shed on the right; the
one with the petrol thingies outside. We think that’s a maintenance
shed for vehicles, and the one next to it’s a generator shed.’
‘So that’s a way we might be able to get in,’
Homer said thoughtfully.
‘We can’t wait six months for a truck to
conveniently break down,’ Lee said.
‘We could maybe make one break down,’ Robyn
said. ‘Couldn’t we?’
‘How?’
Three of us asked that question at once and no
one had an answer. A flat tyre wouldn’t be enough and it was hard
to think of any other possibility. Still, it was maybe a step
forward.
I took Kevin out to look for explosives. We
might have to make a proper bomb this time and, according to Jock,
we’d be able to find plenty of ingredients in sheds and farm
buildings. I hoped he was right and I hoped he was wrong. If he
were wrong, we might then have an excuse to call this crazy thing
off. It seemed to be building up so quickly into an enormous
operation. I’m sure heroes don’t go around thinking: Hope I can
find a good excuse to get out of this. I wanted to be a hero but
never seemed to quite get it right.
We wandered out into a different part of the
country. There weren’t so many colonists in this area yet; there
were still a number of empty houses. Only the best places were
occupied. It was easy to tell which were in use, and to give them a
wide berth. The good thing was that a lot of clearing had been
going on right through this district before the war, and that made
it a certainty that there’d been a lot of blasting. Cockies love
messing with explosives, and any big stubborn tree stump was a good
enough excuse. It’s amazing that there aren’t thousands of farmers
walking round with only half their fingers, but I never heard of
anyone blowing himself up. Dad had a few goes with gelignite when I
was younger but Mum talked him into giving it a miss. I wished now
that he’d taught me how to use it, and then, remembering that I was
meant to be looking for excuses, was glad he hadn’t.
We had a mixed morning. The first farm had
nothing, the second had a dozen bags of ammonium nitrate
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