Headhunters

Chapter Five

It was dawn.

John Milton jumped out of the Jeep and took out his cigarettes. He had only one left. He had been surviving on nicotine and caffeine all night, but the effect was starting to wear off. He was tired. They had been driving for four hours. He took his lighter from his pocket, put the cigarette to his lips and lit it. The three other men he had been riding with jumped down, too. They looked exhausted. The dust had gathered on their boots; their work clothes were torn and dirty; their discoloured and stained parkas and duffle coats were draped around their shoulders to ward against the cool night air. They were covered in dirt, dried blood — some of it their own — and sweat. Milton glanced down at himself and realised that he looked just as bad as the rest of them. He held the cigarette between filthy fingers, the skin of his hand blackened with the detritus of a long week of work. His face was rough with stubble. He hadn’t had a chance to shave for days.

Despite all of it, the deprivations and the back-breaking work, Milton felt good.

He took a long drag on the cigarette. The sun crested the bleak horizon of One Tree Plain. The outback spread out as far as he could see, most of it red and desolate, like the surface of Mars. The Lachlan River ran through the station, encouraging a little greenery near its fast-flowing waters.

Milton reflected that you only really got a sense of the scale of Australia when you were deep in the middle of it. He knew it was big, of course. He knew that if the country was overlaid atop North America, it would stretch from Manitoba in the north to Florida in the south, and from San Francisco to New York. But being here, deep in the wilderness — that was when you got a true sense of its vastness.

Milton had visited the country before. The last time had been a babysitting assignment with an analyst from the Firm who was conducting business in Canberra. The capital was as bland and dull as Washington, D.C., a grid of clean streets, a place that emptied as soon as the legislative business was done. There had been no opportunity for him to visit the interior. Today, as he watched the sun rise, he was a thousand kilometres from the capital. He was deep in the outback.

Harry Douglas walked over to him. Douglas was the foreman. He was gruff and coarse, and Milton had known him for years. They had served in the SAS together. Milton was not in the business of having friends, and, since relationships were impractical for Group Fifteen agents, he had denuded himself of most of his attachments when he had been recruited.

Douglas had been medically discharged from the Regiment after he had broken both legs when his parachute had failed to deploy properly during a training jump. The two of them had been close, and they had commiserated about Douglas’s discharge over a long night of drinking in Hereford. He had explained to Milton that he was going to go back home to Australia and work on his father’s sheep station. They had emailed a couple of times while Milton was working in Florida, and when Douglas had suggested he come over for a visit, he had agreed. Miami had been pleasant enough, but it was a town that was full of distractions and temptations. He had been contemplating another cross-country trek to put those dangerous impulses behind him, but the promise of something completely different had been difficult to resist.

“All right, John?” Harry said.

“Yeah.”

“You look done in.”

“Don’t look so good yourself.”

Harry grinned. They were both competitive, and each had made no secret of the fact that he was a better man than the other. The score was most easily kept with the number of sheep that they were able to shear in the course of a day. Douglas was impeded by the limp he still suffered after his accident. Milton was more agile. But Douglas was big and strong, able to wrestle the sheep, and he had the benefit of years of experience. His best day saw him add 124 sheep to his tally. Milton lagged somewhere behind him with a best of 89. He kept trying, though. He was too committed to give up.

“Long day ahead. We’ll grab a couple of hours of kip, get some breakfast and then go at it. You okay with that?”

“Of course.”

They were at Booligal Sheep Station, a shearing shed on the outskirts of the town of Booligal. It was in deepest New South Wales, the last town on the road between Hay and Wilcannia. Milton had come to assess the size of a station by the number of shearing stands in the shearing shed. The station they had worked at for the last week had six stands. That wasn’t unusual. Booligal had ten stands. It was a big station, and it promised an awful lot of sheep that were going to need to be sheared.

Milton reached back into the Jeep for his pack and followed Douglas and the others as they walked into the rickety building. Their accommodation was in a room adjacent to the mess. They each had a camp bed and a locker to store their things. Milton walked along the room to the single bathroom. There was a shower, a toilet and a sink. It had been given a cursory clean, but it was still dirty.

He didn’t care.

Milton went back to the dormitory, dropped his bag on the bed and took out his dungarees and flannels. They had been new when he had been given them, but they had taken an almighty battering during the season so that they were almost rigid with the dust and dried sweat and blood. He sat down on the edge of the bed and prised off his boots. They had been new, too, redolent with the tang of fresh leather. They were cracked and beaten now, baked in the sun for six weeks. They looked ancient.

He undressed, took a quick shower, and then took out his copy of the Big Book and opened it at random. Milton read two pages, stopping to reread the sentence that he had already underlined on two previous occasions.

“The idea that somehow, someday he will control and enjoy his drinking is the great obsession of every abnormal drinker.”

He thought about that for a moment and then put the book back into his pack. He had no intention that any of the others should see that he had it. They would just have questions and he had no interest in discussing his illness.

He lay down to rest. He was asleep within minutes of his head touching the pillow.