Headhunters

Chapter Sixty

The motorcade had driven out from the collection of huts and other ramshackle buildings that comprised the homestead at Boolanga. It was an hour past dawn, and the sun was already starting to bake the sand and rock beneath the wheels of Matilda Douglas’s Jeep. She remembered how hot the day had been yesterday. It had persisted deep into the night, pulsing out of the ground as they ate their fry-up of mutton, finished with bottles of beer that had been chilling in an ice bucket.

Matilda had been back on the station for a month. It was coming to the end of the season, and the sheep needed to be mustered so that the rams could be separated from the ewes and the male lambs neutered. They had received a report overnight that five sheep had broken free of the vast 10,000-acre paddock, and that dingoes had been seen in the area. The business was not so flush with cash that they could write off those sheep, so they had determined to go out and find them.

There were four of them that morning: Mervyn and Eric were on motorbikes, and Harry was overhead in the small Cessna that they used to direct operations. He was circling above the paddock, having located the runaways and radioed their location down to the other members of the posse. Mervyn and Eric had gone ahead to round them up. Matilda could still see the long plumes of red dust that were kicked up by the wheels of their bikes. She would find a suitable spot and then take the temporary pens from the trailer and erect them so that the animals could be herded back into captivity. Once they had been penned, they would be driven into the back of the trailer and Matilda would return them to the rest of the flock.

The radio crackled into life. “They’re running to the south,” said Harry.

“Roger that,” Eric radioed back. “I can see the bastards. We’ll loop around and drive them east.”

Matilda picked up the radio and spoke into it. “Do it sooner rather than later. It’s going to be as hot as Hell today.”

Matilda’s Jeep was towing a trailer behind it, and the towball rattled noisily in the coupling head as the vehicle bounced across the uneven dirt track. She found a suitable spot and braked to a halt. The landscape stretched on for miles, almost identical whichever way you looked. The sky above was a cold blue, unspoiled by cloud. There were clumps of angry-looking bushes, trees that had been beaten down by the sun, and knots of yellowed, parched grass. There had been a big storm the day before yesterday, and the deluge had painted more green on the landscape than would have been usual for this time of the year. The dusty earth drank the water up, and the ochre had seemed deeper than usual as the first stabs of light had lanced out from the horizon earlier.

Matilda muscled the pens out of the back of the trailer and set them up. They were arranged in a wide V, with the open trailer at the point where the two arms of the V met.

Doves watched from the branches of a nearby tree. A kangaroo regarded her with what she took to be pity as it idled by. It took her twenty minutes to erect the fences and, when she was done, she was damp with sweat. She took a bottle of water from the Jeep and was about to sit down in the shadow of the trailer when she saw a smudge of dust rising to the west. She had forgotten her binoculars in the rush to get going this morning and she cursed herself for it now. It was a vehicle, still too distant to identify, but if she had to guess, she would have said that it was another motorbike.

She leaned into the Jeep and picked up the radio to call her brother, but decided against it. He was out of position, so he wouldn’t easily be able to overfly what she was looking at for a second opinion. And he would panic, thinking about what had happened to her, and send Mervyn or Eric, or both of them, back to help. The whole morning’s work would be ruined. The sheep would be gone.

No. She’d handle this herself.

Because Bachman was dead.

She had seen him die.

And if the Mossad wanted her, would they really send one agent on a motorbike?

She clipped the radio back onto the dash, reached across for her shotgun and then stood next to the Jeep to wait for whomever was approaching.

Distance was deceptive in the outback, and it was another five minutes before the new arrival was close enough for her to confirm that he or she was, indeed, riding a motorbike. She wished, again, that she had her binoculars, and, instead, occupied herself by breaking the shotgun and thumbing in two shells. She clicked it shut again and then held it across her body, the index finger of her right hand resting over the trigger guard.

Another five minutes passed and now she saw that the rider was a man. He flicked the bike around a depression and then leapt over a termite mound.

Two minutes after that and Matilda recognised him.

She flicked the safety on the shotgun, propped it against the side of the Jeep, and walked out, leaving the blessing of the shade and meeting him halfway.