Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn Read online

  THE TOMORROW SERIES

  JOHN

  MARSDEN

  THE OTHER

  SIDE

  OF DAWN

  PAN

  Pan Macmillan Australia

  The reference to the bell tolling on page 240 is paraphrased from ‘Devotions’ by John Donne.

  John Marsden’s website can be visited at: www.johnmarsden.com.au

  First published 1999 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  First published 2000 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street

  , Sydney

  Reprinted 2000 (twice), 2001, 2003, 2004 (three times), 2005, 2006 (twice), 2007, 2008

  Copyright © Jomden Pty Ltd 1999

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Marsden, John, 1950-. The other side of dawn.

  ISBN 978-0-330-36213-9.

  I. Title. (Series: Marsden, John, 1950- Tomorrow series; bk. 7).

  A823.3

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  To the people of Tibet, East Timor, and

  West Papua (Irian Jaya)

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks for ideas, information and stories to

  Dallas Wilkinson

  Ross Barlow

  Lizzie Matthews

  Roos Marsden

  Jeanne Marsden

  Charlotte Lindsay

  The Farran family, especially Elizabeth

  Barry Traill

  Chris Kalff

  Lesley Tuncliffe (‘Write Inside the Mind’)

  Lachlan Monsbourgh

  Lachie Dunn

  Special thanks to Anna McFarlane for editing the manuscript, and to Paul Kenny for his perceptive and generous support of this series since its earliest days.

  Chapter One

  The noise of a helicopter at night fills the whole world. Your ears rattle with the sound. Your other senses haven’t got a hope. Oh of course you can still see, and smell, and feel. You see the dark shape of the chopper dropping like a huge March fly, with just two thin white lights checking the ground below. You smell the fumes of the aviation fuel. They go straight to your head, making you dizzy, like you’re a little drunk. You feel the blast of air, getting stronger and stronger, blowing your hair then buffeting your whole body. But you hardly notice any of that stuff. The noise takes over everything. It’s like a turbo-charged cappuccino machine. You’ve got your hands over your ears but it doesn’t matter; you still can’t keep out the racket.

  All sounds are louder at night, and at three in the morning a helicopter is very, very loud.

  When you’re scared it sounds even louder.

  In the middle of the bush you don’t normally get loud noises. Cockatoos at dusk, tractors in the paddock, cattle bellowing: they’re about as noisy as it gets. So the helicopter did kind of stand out.

  There wasn’t much we could do about it. Lee and Homer and Kevin were at different points around the paddocks, on high spots overlooking gates and four-wheel-drive tracks. We’d scrapped our first plan, which was to leave Kevin and Fi in Hell to look after the little kids. We’d decided at the last minute that we needed everyone we could get. We were so nervous, not knowing what to expect. So Kevin came with us and Fi had to do the babysitting on her own.

  I agonised over that decision. That’s what this war seemed to be all about, agonising over decisions. We called it right more often than we called it wrong, but the consequences of mistakes were so terrible. It wasn’t enough to score ninety-nine per cent in the tests of war; not if the other one per cent represented a human life.

  If we’d called this one wrong we’d lose Fi, Casey, Natalie, Jack and Gavin. Pretty bad call. A few days ago we would have felt confident leaving Fi there. Not any more. Not after the gunfight of twenty-four hours earlier. Not after spending the morning burying the bullet-torn and chopped-up bodies of the eight soldiers we’d killed.

  So, the boys were watching for more enemy soldiers, but at best they’d get only a few minutes warning of anyone approaching. There were too many different ways the soldiers could come. Plus, we didn’t know exactly where the chopper would land. Last time it had been about a kilometre and a half from its target, which was pretty good, considering how hard the navigation must be, but if it was that far out again our sentries were useless.

  Actually the pilot did well. He didn’t go where we landed last time. He came down where we should have landed last time. But that was OK, because it was still in the area we’d marked out. In the excitement of watching the great black shape dropping onto us, and with my ears deafened by the clatter of the blades and the roar of the engine, I forgot for a moment about the dangers of gatecrashers.

  Through the dark perspex of the chopper I could see the glow of the dashboard lights and the green light on the navigation table. The storm of dust and leaves meant I couldn’t see the people, only a few dark heads. I was hoping the pilot would be Sam, the guy who’d brought us over last time, because I liked him, and admired him. For a guy I’d met only once, and so briefly, he’d made a big impression. But there was no telling who was flying this helicopter.

  It settled, like a pregnant cow sinking to the ground, and the side hatch dropped open straightaway. A figure in dark clothes leapt out, then he turned to help bring down a large container. I ran forward. Two other people, in uniform, jumped through the hatch, and the four of us, without a word, arranged ourselves in a line, passing out a heap of boxes and barrels. I found myself panting, like the effort of doing it was full-on exhausting; I guess it wasn’t, but it felt that way.

  Less than three minutes later, the first soldier, putting one hand on either side of the hatch, levered himself back up and disappeared inside; the next one followed, and at the same moment the helicopter lifted off. If Sam had been at the controls I’d have had no chance to see him, let alone say hello.

  Anyway there was no time for anything really, not even thinking. I’d registered that with two people back in the chopper we still had one on the ground, but we also had a heap of stuff. There’d been no warning from Colonel Finley of what to expect, just that we’d have a visitor for twenty-four hours. My curiosity was running at maximum revs.

  There was no time to satisfy it. The man and I started carrying the boxes towards a pile of rocks a hundr
ed metres to the west. It was the nearest cover. We wouldn’t be able to get all this stuff into Hell in one trip, and there wouldn’t be time to go there and back before dawn. I heard a slippage of stones and turned around in time to see Lee coming up the slope, out of the darkness. For a moment it seemed he wore the darkness, was dressed in it, but he was moving so quickly that he was with me before I had time to think about that.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he whispered, looking around all the time, like he was having a bad trip and thought spiders were crawling all over him.

  ‘Is it safe?’ I asked, more worried that he had left his lookout post than I was about answering his question.

  ‘No, what do you bloody reckon?’

  We were all on edge. But I didn’t like the way he kept looking around.

  ‘Well, is he here?’ Lee asked.

  ‘Yeah. With a heap of stuff.’ I nodded at the crate I was dragging along. ‘Grab the other end will you.’

  We carried it between us, then went back for another one. In the meantime Homer and Kevin had arrived, so by the time they took a couple of crates, and the man got a second load, Lee and I could take it easy.

  Suddenly the night was peaceful once more. The helicopter had long gone – the noise just a memory – and the air was clear and sweet. It was hard to believe in a war, or enemies, or danger. With the stuff safely stowed we found ourselves standing in a little group on the edge of the escarpment.

  And we were all embarrassed. Well, I don’t know about the others, but I was, and they looked it. It had been so long since we’d met any strangers. Apart from the feral kids – and I couldn’t really count them – we’d been on our own a long time.

  The man looked about thirty. He was dressed in camouflage gear, but without a cap. From what I could see in the moonlight he had black hair and quite a dark face; heavy eyebrows that met in the middle. Ears that stuck out a bit and an unshaven chin. He smelt like a smoker. That was all I had time to notice. We got engaged in a rapid-fire conversation that rattled along like an automatic rifle.

  ‘How far’s your hide-out?’

  ‘Three hours.’

  ‘Will the stuff be safe here?’

  ‘Should be.’

  ‘We could leave a sentry,’ said Lee.

  ‘But a sentry couldn’t do anything against a patrol,’ Homer said.

  ‘We’re a long way from anywhere,’ I said.

  ‘If they tracked the chopper ...’ the man said.

  I realised what he meant. The helicopter might have been picked up by radar or something. If a patrol had been sent from Wirrawee, they could arrive in two or three hours, long after we’d left the area.

  ‘Damn,’ I thought, ‘we’ve got some hard work ahead.’ But out loud I said: ‘We’ll have to move the whole lot.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Towards Tailors Stitch. We could get it halfway up the road tonight. That way we won’t have so far to carry it tomorrow.’

  ‘Which way is Tailors Stitch?’ the man asked.

  ‘North-east.’

  ‘You might want to take it in a different direction after I’ve talked to you,’ he said.

  That brought me to a dead stop. Obviously these crates weren’t just full of Mars bars.

  ‘OK,’ I said, rethinking. ‘You tell us.’

  The man suddenly looked cautious. ‘Anywhere in the direction of Stratton would be OK,’ he said.

  But from the way he said it, I knew Stratton wasn’t the target.

  I paused, mentally scanning possible places, like I was scrolling down on a computer, but rejecting each one. ‘I know,’ I said at last. ‘There is a safe place. But we’ll have to move.’

  We loaded up. The New Zealander pulled out a couple of backpacks that he suggested we take to our hide-out. Everything else had to be carried away. With five of us we could do it in two trips, but we each had to take a fair bit of weight.

  The place I had in mind was the wetlands; a swamp on the eastern boundary of our property. My grandfather drained the wetlands, paying for it with a government grant that they were handing out in those days. He turned it into pasture. Before I was born Dad brought in the bulldozers and dug it all out again. It was a radical thing to do. Most farmers wanted to turn every square centimetre into productive land, and to hell with the natural features or the natural vegetation. But trust my stubborn father: he was determined to bring back those wetlands.

  Grandpa spat chips in a big way and the neighbours thought we were mad. But Dad reckoned it’d give us a good source of permanent water, and it’d bring back birds that keep the insects down, plus it’d be a huge firebreak.

  He was right too, on all three counts. I remember how proud he was when the ibis started nesting on the islands in the middle of the swamp. The first season they came, there were eight or nine pairs, the next year twenty, and now we had a few hundred, returning every year.

  It was quite good actually. Bit of a contribution to the environment.

  The main reason I thought we should go there was that if a patrol brought dogs to chase us, the wetlands would stop them in their tracks. I didn’t know what was in the boxes, but the way this guy was acting it must have been important. So I thought it was worth going the extra couple of k’s to get the stuff onto the islands. The wetlands covered about eight hectares, so it’d take a few dogs a few days to search that little lot.

  We got there pretty quickly. Grunting with relief I dropped the box I’d carried. In front of me, tied to a bolt in a tree stump, was an old yellow and green dinghy which I’d mucked around in when I was a kid. It only had one oar; I don’t know where the other one went, but it had been missing for as long as I could remember.

  We all wanted to row the stuff to the island but Kevin and I got the job because I knew the best hiding place, and Homer had to navigate the others back to where the chopper landed.

  We got into the boat with a bit of difficulty, mainly because Kevin tried to push off and jump in at the same time. But after some wild rocking, with me clutching both sides, we managed to get clear of the shore.

  As the others went back along the shoreline they couldn’t resist. Lee had to chuck a handful of mud, and Homer bombed us with a rock. It was a very bad idea. The soldier went off like a car backfiring. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he snarled at them. ‘Mother of God. Show a bit of sense.’

  Kevin and I giggled at each other. But I didn’t really blame the man. He was probably wondering why on earth he’d been sent all the way from New Zealand to talk to a bunch of teenage dropkicks. He followed the two boys, watching them as he made his way through the grass. He sure didn’t pick up any mud or rocks.

  Distracted by Lee and Homer playing silly buggers, Kevin and I had got into a 360, and by the time we recovered and looked around at the bank they’d disappeared. I just got a glimpse of Lee’s tall thin body disappearing like a shadow over the crest of the hill.

  Suddenly it seemed awfully cold and dark and lonely, even with Kevin there.

  We didn’t talk much, just rowed in a clumsy zigzag way till we grounded on mud. We carried the boxes and packs into the bushes, causing a riot among the birds, who probably hadn’t seen a human visitor since Homer and I stirred them up a few years ago.

  Yes, that first trip was OK. By the end of the second trip I was so tired that when Lee picked up a handful of mud, glancing around guiltily to make sure the New Zealander wasn’t watching, I ripped off a string of words that convinced him to drop it back in the water.

  ‘OK, mud-mouth,’ he said sulkily, ‘I wasn’t going to throw it.’

  The trouble was, I was already thinking of the trek into Hell. We were heading for another late finish. After dealing with Gavin and the other kids all day, then hauling this stuff, I couldn’t find my sense of humour at 4.45 in the morning. I tried to tie up the boat, but the rope was so thick and slippery that I kept losing one end, and then I couldn’t get the knot to hold. The boys were bringing branches and brush to cam
ouflage the boat and cover our tracks. Everyone was slipping in the mud and swearing.

  The man from New Zealand was over at the point of the wetlands, gazing into the distance, but I think watching us at the same time. Again I thought he would be less than impressed. Something about the attitude of these professional soldiers got so far up my nostrils it reached my sinuses. Oh well. I was past caring what anyone thought.

  Chapter Two

  I’m not a big believer in instinct, but I felt weirdly anxious as we slogged our way up the spur in the last of the darkness. We didn’t talk much. We were too tired and strung out. When we stopped for a breather the man did at least tell us his name. Ryan was twenty-eight, he lived just outside Dunedin, he was an engineer. He wouldn’t say his last name.

  ‘Why won’t you tell us?’ I asked.

  ‘You’d never be able to pronounce it,’ he answered.

  ‘No, really, why not?’

  ‘Security.’

  I stood there in the semi-darkness, leaning against a snow gum, wondering what he meant. I figured it out soon enough: if we were caught and forced to tell everything we knew – well, the less we knew, the better.

  It scared me to realise he was thinking in those terms. It made me feel we were too casual sometimes.

  Lost in my thoughts I’d stopped listening to the whispered conversation; when I paid attention again I found Homer was in the middle of firing a bunch of questions at Ryan. He got a few answers. Turned out Ryan was in a New Zealand Army group called the SAS, and he had the rank of captain, which I think might have been fairly impressive for a twenty-eight-year-old.

  He had a growly sort of voice, very strong and firm, like a tractor engine. You felt he was reliable. He sounded the way I’d like to sound, always knowing what to do, never being flurried or flustered. ‘Flurry and fluster, they sound like a pair of puppies.’ That was in a book I’d read once. What was the name of it? I couldn’t remember. A year out of school and my brain was peanut butter.