Wildfire

Chapter Twelve

Kelly looked over the instruments. She checked the height, the windspeed and their bearing, then sat back. ‘We’re going steadily and conditions seem to be good. I could use some first aid. You can let go of the controls.’

Cautiously, Ben let go of the stick and the throttle. ‘How long can I leave them for?’

‘Well, you wouldn’t have time for an appendectomy, but you can bandage my hands. Do it quickly though.’

‘Where’s the first-aid kit?’ said Ben.

‘It’s your water bottle and my scarf,’ said Kelly.

‘Hmm. Well, next time you might want to pack some plasters.’ Ben reached for the gold and black scarf around Kelly’s neck. He unfastened it, tore it into two long strips and poured water from his bottle over them.

Kelly managed a chuckle. ‘That scarf belongs to my mom. It’s Versace. If she saw you doing that she’d skin you alive.’ Very gingerly, she held her left hand out for Ben to bandage.

Ben was shocked at the sight of her burns. The skin was charred and weeping. He started the bandage around her fingers so that he could secure it tightly, then took it across the burned flesh. Kelly went still as a statue, trying not to pull away. He took the strip around her hand again, then fastened it at her wrist, well away from the burned area. Silently she offered him her right hand. That looked even worse but she let him bandage it without a murmur.

‘It looks nastier than it is,’ said Ben, not knowing if that was true or not. ‘This will keep the skin moist anyhow.’

He had just finished fastening the makeshift bandages when a shrill sound made him jump out of his skin.

He scanned the instruments, looking for a flashing red light or a whirling dial. ‘What the hell is it? What’s gone wrong?’

Kelly shook her head. ‘It’s just my phone.’ She nodded towards the cradle by the instrument panel.

Ben pressed answer and the display flashed up the word ‘Dad’.

It was a bad connection. In the middle of a lot of hissing and crackling, Ben could hear a male voice with an American accent.

‘Kelly … Kelly — you there? Are you all right? Tell me you’re safe.’

‘Hi, Dad, I’m here. I’m safe. No problem. But are you all right?’ Kelly reassured her dad — but clearly needed to know that he, too, was clear of any fire.

There was a hiss of static, then one phrase came through clearly. ‘Protestors grabbed me …’ More static.

‘What?’ said Kelly. ‘Dad, can you repeat that?’

‘Protestors grabbed me …’

They weren’t sure the first time what he had said, but this time there was no mistaking it.

‘Dad!’ shouted Kelly. ‘Are you all right?’

The major didn’t answer Kelly’s question; just went on talking. Maybe he couldn’t hear them. Among the waves of hiss, only a few words were audible: ‘Bel … conference centre …’

Ben was shocked. He leaned close to the phone in its cradle, as if that would help the major hear him better. ‘Bel? What about Bel? My mum — is she all right?’

Kelly leaned forward too. In fact it made no difference because the sound was going through the headset system. ‘Dad, where are you?’

‘Major Kurtis, where’s Bel?’

‘I’m on the gan …’

‘Where?’

The connection was getting worse. The major tried once more. ‘On the gan …’

Then the connection failed and they heard no more. Kelly waved her bandaged hands at the phone. ‘Quick, call him back.’

Ben had the phone in his hands, trying to navigate the menu. ‘I’m trying!’ He found the major’s number, but when he pressed call back, it wouldn’t connect.

Kelly was frantic. ‘Damn! I saw those protestors this morning. I knew they were up to no good. They just hate Americans — we’re an easy target. We lived near Sydney for a couple of years and had to have special security at home because somebody tried to fire-bomb our garden.’ Suddenly she looked sharply ahead. ‘Watch your altitude! We’ve drifted down three hundred feet!’

All at once Ben remembered the plane. He opened the throttle and climbed to fifteen hundred feet again.

Kelly snapped out more corrections. ‘You’re not level. And slow down, we’re going to run out of fuel if you keep going like this. Have you any idea where we’re heading?’

Ben was struggling to keep up with her instructions. ‘No, I don’t know where we’re going. You were finding us somewhere to land. Just chill.’

Kelly spluttered. ‘Chill? They’ve got your mom too — aren’t you worried?’

‘Of course I’m worried but we won’t get anywhere by panicking. Is the plane OK? Can I leave it for long enough to call her?’

Kelly looked at the controls. ‘Yeah. For a minute or so.’

Ben put his phone in the cradle and tried Bel. But it wouldn’t make the connection.

‘Call nine-one-one,’ said Kelly.

‘Treble zero,’ said Ben irritably. He dialled and was put through immediately.

‘Which service do you require?’

‘Police.’

Another voice came on the line almost immediately. ‘Hello, police here.’

Kelly took over. ‘My father is Major Brad Kurtis of the US army. He’s just been kidnapped from the conference centre in Adelaide.’

‘Your father has been kidnapped?’ repeated the police controller. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, and there’s someone with him. Dr Bel Kelland. She’s British.’

‘Sorry, can you repeat that?’

Ben took over. He spelled out Bel’s name and tried to give a brief description. ‘She’s small, about five three, with red hair—’

Kelly interrupted, yelling, ‘The gan! He said he was on the gan!’

Ben wanted to strangle her. She wasn’t helping by getting so hyper, and if she kept interrupting, how would the police ever get the information they needed?

‘Can you repeat that?’ asked the police controller patiently.

‘G-H-A-N,’ spelled out Kelly. She was reading off the map on her knee. Down one side was an advert with a picture of a big red train. ‘It’s a train that runs from Adelaide to Darwin.’

‘Oh yes,’ said the police controller. ‘We know the Ghan. We’ll send officers to investigate. Thank you for your call.’

Kelly looked up at the fuel gauge and screwed up her face.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Ben. ‘Tell me what to do.’

‘I’m working out if we’ve got enough fuel.’

‘Why? Are we going to run out?’

Kelly did some silent calculations before she answered him. ‘No. We’ve got plenty. We’re going to follow the Ghan.’

Further down the coast, in Melbourne, the weather reporting station was hosting a crisis meeting. The mayor, the police chief and the head of the Melbourne fire department were gathered in the tiny office of the chief meteorologist discussing whether they should put their city on alert.

The meteorologist was pointing to a series of satellite images of Adelaide showing how the fire had progressed. In the final one, taken a couple of minutes earlier, the entire landscape was black, blotted out by clouds of smoke.

The fire chief spoke first: ‘This fire should not be this bad. It should have been containable.’

His comment sent ripples of surprise through the cramped room.

‘I agree,’ said the meteorologist. ‘Let me show you …’ She cursored back, looking for a picture. ‘It seems to have got dramatically worse when the weather changed.’ She pointed out the features on the screen — the distinctive coastline of Adelaide. ‘This is Port Adelaide here, the Murray river — we can see by the cloud formations that it’s a hot, still day. The anemometers around the city confirm it; hardly any breeze at all.’

The fire chief pointed to some dark smudges on the picture. ‘You can see there are a few bush fires, but look at the smoke — they’re not going anywhere. They would burn out safely if they were managed properly.’

The meteorologist took up the story. ‘But now, if we look at this …’ She scrolled along to another picture. ‘This was ten minutes later.’

The audience gasped. The clouds had become black and white streaks swirling in an angry vortex. It looked like a picture of a hurricane.

‘It must be some mistake,’ said the police chief. ‘It can’t be the same day.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said the meteorologist. ‘But there’s no mistake. From nowhere we’ve got winds of up to a hundred k.p.h. When those winds blew up, that’s when the fire really took hold.’

The chief of police sighed. ‘Why didn’t the fore-casters give us any warning of this?’

The meteorologist shook her head. ‘They didn’t know it was coming.’

The mayor looked incredulous. ‘A wind can’t just spring up out of nowhere. We’ve got half a billion dollars worth of satellite equipment to track this kind of thing!’

The meteorologist replied calmly, ‘I agree with you. Something like that doesn’t just sneak up unannounced. That’s why I looked at the records myself. I looked at the exact same information the Adelaide forecasters had and I ran a computer simulation. And I came to the same conclusion as they did — that it would be a hot, still day.’

The mayor folded his arms. He looked very unhappy. ‘So it’s another spell of freak weather? We seem to be getting rather a lot of that.’

‘We normally try to think in more scientific terms than that,’ replied the chief meteorologist, ‘but there’s no explanation for this. We don’t know why the weather changed. But when it did, it meant nothing short of disaster for Adelaide.’

Someone else was also taking a keen interest in weather satellite pictures of Adelaide. In a lab far more spacious than the monitoring station in Melbourne, two military scientists were looking closely at a screen, squinting to see it in the bright sunshine that streamed in through the window. They wore faded blue uniforms; the name tag on one said GRISHKEVICH, the other’s said HIJKOOP. Around them was a bank of computer monitors and electronic equipment, all emblazoned with the insignia of the US army. On racks of machinery around the walls, red and green LEDs flashed a constant pulse like heart-beat monitors, and glowing digital displays counted up and down. Whatever was going on in that room was very complex and needed expert monitoring.

Outside the window was a stretch of reddish desert criss-crossed by tyre marks, but the skyline was dominated by a massive white dome. A military Jeep was driving around the outside of that dome. It was probably doing about 50 k.p.h. — the speed limit within the compound — but the dome was so huge that the vehicle looked like it was hardly moving at all.

Beyond the dome was a high wire fence topped with barbed wire, which marked the perimeter of the compound; and beyond that was the Great Victoria Desert — a barren plain in the middle of the outback.

‘Koop,’ said Grishkevich, ‘could you close those blinds? I can’t see the screen properly.’

Hijkoop got up and pulled the blinds shut.

‘Oh no,’ said Grishkevich.

The tone in his voice made Hijkoop hurry back to look at what was on the screen. He was horrified by what he saw there.

Adelaide was completely blotted out by black clouds of smoke. Something had gone very wrong.

‘I thought you were trying to up the rainfall, Grish,’ said Hijkoop.

‘Yeah.’ Grishkevich let out a long sigh and ran his fingers through his thinning hair. ‘No good. All we’re getting is the wind speed picking up instead.’

Hijkoop couldn’t take his eyes off the picture on the screen. ‘Grish, we have to shut it down. The wind is going to make matters worse.’

Grishkevich shook his head slowly. Eventually he spoke. ‘I already did shut it down. But I’ve got a nasty feeling it may be too late for that. Unless that wind dies down of its own accord, Adelaide’s going to turn into a fire storm.’