Burning for Revenge (7 page)

Homer had done a quick tour of most of the building, jogging around its vast perimeter, and now he was back at the little door. Every couple of minutes he opened it a fraction and snuck another look. "This is the only entrance, I think," he said to me. "That's good. Means they've got less chance of surprising us. We can make our plans from here, while we watch them."

I was impressed by that. I thought, "You're not bad sometimes, Homer. Right now, when there's every reason to panic, you're thinking about tactics and survival. A lot of people would have given up."

And I was feeling like one of those people. But his strength gave me strength. I felt myself grow a little, get a little tougher and more determined. I said, "You keep a lookout. I'll get the others."

I ran to them and broke the news. "I hate to tell you guys, but we're slap bang in the middle of Wirrawee Airfield."

They took it in their different ways. Lee trembled slightly and didn't say a word, Fi put her hand to her mouth and sat on the'step of the truck, and Kevin swore at me as if it were my fault. I realised a moment later that he thought it was, as he said: "If you hadn't told us to get in this bloody truck in the first place..." He stopped and stood glaring at me. But Fi turned on him angrily.

"How dare you? You know perfectly well there wasn't any choice. Just because you're scared. Well, there's plenty to be scared about, but don't take it out on Ellie."

There it was, the "scared" word again. It was getting quite popular.

Lee ignored all this. He was good at ignoring things he didn't want to know about. He was probably in the world's top ten for that. Already he was on his way to the door, to join Homer. I thought the smartest thing for me to do would be to go over there too.

We held a quick conference at the door. First the others had to open it and sneak a look through the crack, as if they didn't quite believe me, as if they thought I'd made the whole thing up. But their pale faces and trembling lips, after they'd had their peep, made it pretty obvious that they believed me now.

Even Lee looked as though this was too much to cope with.

"What are we going to do?" Fi asked, as usual. Was it my imagination or was her gaze fixed on me, in the dim shadowy light? No, it wasn't my imagination. And not only Fi. The three boys were gazing at me too, even Homer. I'm not sure when it first happened, this promotion of me to the position of the person with ideas, the person who'd get us out of tight spots, but at some stage it had happened, and now they seemed to take it for granted that I'd have inspirations on cue. It was like Homer had the positive energy and I was meant to have the positive ideas. But this time I gazed blankly back at them. Finally I said, pretty weakly, "Well, it should be easier to get out than in."

"The truck, it's our only hope," Kevin said. "We'll have to wait till it goes out again, and hide in it."

"I don't know about that," Lee said. "If he loads stuff in it here, where do we hide while he's doing it?"

"It might be weeks before it goes out again," Fi said. "We'd have starved to death by then." She looked around, wrinkling her nose. "There's not even a toilet."

"Well, we can't walk out," Kevin said. "And we can't dress up in stolen uniforms and bluff it, like they do in the movies. If we don't get out in the truck, we're done for."

Our meeting was suddenly interrupted. A rumbling noise outside and a slight vibration of the building were our only warnings. We looked at each other fearfully then turned and sprinted for the truck.

We tumbled into the back of it just in time. A moment later I heard the rattle of a metal door sliding open, and the low rumbling became a loud throbbing. Homer was again watching, this time through a crack in the van door. "There're more trucks coming in," he reported, "...a whole bunch of them."

It got pretty loud there for a while. The shed—or hangar I suppose I should call it, because I was beginning to realise that's what it was—amplified the engines, causing their noise to echo around the walls. I could smell the fumes too: they seeped into our truck and made the air pretty foul for a while.

Gradually though, things started to quieten again. The engines were shut off. I could hear footsteps, and a few comments shouted as doors opened and shut. Someone walked past our truck actually drumming a tune on the side with his fingers. Fi, crouched beside me in the dark bowels of the van, half covered by felt, stiffened as though she'd had 240 volts put through her. I must admit I felt like I'd had an electric toaster dropped in my bath water.

Then there was nothing for a minute, until the sound of the sliding metal door again.

Then complete silence.

It seemed we were alone once more. Maybe. Homer gently opened the back door a centimetre and had a little peep. Then he opened it about ten centimetres. Then thirty. Finally he was satisfied, and opened it the whole way. We all got out.

There were now twenty trucks in the hangar. They still seemed small in the huge shed. They were a variety of shapes and sizes, from tray-tops to semis to vans. There were some genuine Army trucks in green and khaki camouflage paint, and some from businesses in Wirrawee and Stratton. Trucks that had become part of the war souvenirs these guys had scored for themselves. I saw an old prime mover with HHA Holdings written on the side. HHA Holdings was Mr. and Mrs. Arthur's company: they owned "Random Hills," a property about three kilometres away from the Quinns' place, next to the Ramsays'.

We had a quick look around the different vehicles. It didn't seem to help us much, having them there. So we had twenty to pick from now, instead of one. Did that make any real difference? None of them had any great hiding places.

In the middle of the hangar Lee said to me, quietly, where the others couldn't hear, "We have to approach this whole thing differently."

He'd obviously been doing some thinking. More than I'd been doing. My mind was chaos: it was a mess in there. Maybe Lee was going to take over as the ideas person. He was welcome to the job.

"How do you mean?" I asked cautiously.

"We have to see it as an opportunity."

"Oh no," I groaned to myself. I hate it when people talk like that. "Turn your negatives into positives." "Don't bring me problems,' bring me solutions." "Become the person you dare to be." Iain, the leader of the Kiwi soldiers, talked like that a bit. "No, wait a minute," I thought. "You're overreacting. Lee hasn't started sounding like a preacher from a Sunday morning TV show ... yet."

I still hadn't spoken and when he realised I wasn't going to say anything he went on.

"We're in an amazing situation here. By a complete accident we've got ourselves into the place that Colonel Finley most wants destroyed. We shouldn't be worrying so much about getting out. We should be thinking about how we can do something huge: something that might change this war in a big, big way. You can see that can't you, Ellie? You know that's the way to go?"

Funny, I'd never heard him talk like that before. It was like he was begging me for support. I wondered if he wasn't sure himself, if he didn't know whether he had the strength and courage for it. He was talking about suicide really, about our deaths, I knew that straight away. There was no way anyone was going to attack this place from the inside and survive. You didn't have to be Einstein to figure that out.

When I still didn't say anything he kept going.

"I could never look anyone in the face again if we ran out of here like scared rabbits. I mean, we've achieved what the Kiwis couldn't, and all we can think about is saving our own skins. Imagine going back to New Zealand and saying to Colonel Finley 'Yeah, we got in there but then we chickened out.' I don't want to act like a frightened little mouse."

"Make up your mind," I said. "Are we chickens or rabbits or mice?"

I walked away from him then. I needed time to think. My skin was prickling again. It's not an easy thing to face your own death. Not when you're feeling young and alive and healthy. But I hardly had a moment to think before Fi came over to where I was standing. I don't know whether she noticed the way I was shaking, but she didn't comment on it. She just said, very quietly, so quietly that I could hardly hear, "Lee wants us to attack the airfield I suppose, does he?"

I nodded, hugging myself. Fi started trembling too. In the same soft voice she said, like she was whispering to herself, "I thought he would."

To my own surprise I said: "I think he's right."

"Now why did I say that?" I thought. I didn't know I'd already made up my own mind. Didn't think I'd even started to make up my mind. "Who's going to tell Kevin?" Fi asked.

We both glanced across at where Kevin was poking around at the end of the hangar. He'd opened a little door and as we watched he went through it. It was so inconspicuous that we hadn't noticed it. It looked like a storeroom or something.

Homer and Lee were talking urgently over by the main door. No prizes for guessing what they were talking about. Fi put her hand on my arm. She didn't say anything. She didn't need to.

Kevin didn't say anything either when we told him. And that was the first problem: we told him instead of asking him. In New Zealand, when Fi and I returned from our run and Homer told us we were coming back here with the Kiwi guerillas, I'd reacted the same way. I'd gone off like a willy-willy in a wheat field. Yet here I was, only weeks later, doing the same thing to Kevin.

Kevin took it a bit differently from the way I had back in Wellington though. It's hard to write this, to say what actually happened, but I've always tried to be honest when I write this stuff, and I guess I'd better not stop now. So what happened with Kevin was that he had some kind of breakdown. Andrea, my friendly counsellor in New Zealand would have had a name for it. Nervous breakdown I guess, except I've never been too sure what that means.

The conversation started well, because Kevin came back quite proudly. He even cracked a little smile. All because of his great discovery. The little room he'd found contained a toilet and some cleaning stuff: a couple of big brooms, a few buckets, junk like that. Having a toilet was huge news. Funny how such a trivial thing could be so important. But the excitement didn't last. Kevin realised something was going on. We were giving him all these congratulations for finding the toilet but he knew it was fake because he suddenly cut across what we were saying. He looked straight at me and said: "You guys are planning something."

I looked straight back and said: "We're going to attack the airfield."

I'd seen a few people go pale since this war started. Fi when the soldiers at Baloney Creek had them all bailed up, for instance. Lee when he was wounded, shot in the thigh. Corrie when she started to realise that the invasion had happened. And of course Homer when he looked through that little door. They were just some of the white faces that rolled through my mind when I thought about people going pale. But Kevin went through pale, into grey. He looked like an old man. His face almost collapsed. He used to be quite fat in the face until recently, when the war turned us all into compulsory weight watchers. But for a moment his head looked more like a skull. Then he put his face in his hands and stood there with his shoulders shaking. He didn't seem to be making any noise, just shook like he was standing on a fracture zone in an earthquake.

None of us knew quite what to do. In the end Fi took him by the arm and led him away to the truck we'd arrived in. He lay in there for the next twelve hours. I don't think he even used the toilet that he'd been so proud of discovering. For a long time I don't think he moved at all. Every half an hour or so someone—usually Fi or I—would go and check on him, but he seemed to be in a sort of coma. A vegetable. A Jerusalem artichoke. I mean, I shouldn't crack jokes about it, but what else can you do? Things were so frightening, and our future seemed so nonexistent, that sometimes jokes were all we had left.

When we weren't checking on Kevin or using our nice porcelain toilet we spent our time in the most urgent, frantic conversations we'd ever had. We dreamed up a lot of different ways to attack the planes—even a couple of ways that might possibly almost work. But we also clung to the desperate hope that we could do it and get away with our lives. That was optimistic of us, greedy, but I think we felt that if we strained our brains hard enough we might come up with something. We were like people hanging over the edge of a cliff, knowing the only way we could save ourselves was to pull so hard we'd dislocate our shoulders.

We were willing to dislocate our brains if it gave us the slightest chance to survive.

While we talked we kept the closest possible watch on what was going on outside. We used a Phillips head screwdriver from the trucks to make tiny peepholes in each wall, and that gave us a 360 degree view. In twelve hours we were interrupted only three times: once when a woman came in to get something from a truck, another time when two mechanics came in and worked on an engine for half an hour. And the third time when a man came in to hide from something. I don't know what it was, nothing too sinister I wouldn't think, but you could tell he was hiding by the way he snuck in, looking back over his shoulder in a guilty way. Maybe he was trying to get out of some boring job. He looked pretty much the way I did when I was avoiding choir practice at school.

During each of these interruptions we hid in the same truck. I don't know if that was a good idea, but whatever we did was a lottery: a terrible game of Russian roulette.

When we had the luxury of being able to spy on the base we least a few things that might be useful. There seemed to be about sixty aircraft out in the open, two-thirds of them great huge things that were probably bombers or troop carriers. The rest were little fighters, like wasps. They were in three lines along a concrete apron that stretched for close on a kilometre. They were packed in pretty tightly and I remembered Colonel Finley saying that as fast as these people kept expanding the airfield the more planes they crowded into it.

Behind the concrete apron were three giant hangars that could have contained anything from the officers' grog supply to another squadron of planes. It was a fair bet though that at least one hangar, probably more than one, was used for aircraft maintenance.