Hindsight (55 page)

Four crewmen dragged Lockman into the open and forced him to lay face down. Mira tried to cling to him, but the captain cut their binding finally and she was dragged away from him, screaming. Behind her, he noticed that Tarin, Ben and Gabby had disappeared, along with Uno and Cinq, leaving the jammed lifeboat and nobody to help protect Mira aside from the traitorous sergeants, Patterson and Pobody, who’d already betrayed her twice.

‘Shoot him!’ Greggie screamed down from the window of the burning bridge. He was up there with a fire extinguisher and another crewman, trying to douse it. ‘Shoot them both and toss them overboard!’

‘No!’ Mira screamed, but Patterson raised his hand and then bodies fell all about the deck like flopping fish — all dead or dying, with single shots to their heads or chest, including the captain.

Long-range snipers, Lockman realised at once — at least six, and considering the continuing pitch and yaw of the vessel, he guessed they had to be the very best of the best snipers, even if they were land-based. The nearest point of contact was over a kilometre away.

‘What took you so long?’ he shouted, but Patterson and Pobody were too busy to reply, caught in a chattering exchange of weapons fire with the two or three men who kept to their cover on the burning bridge.

Lockman scrambled to pull a body off Mira and get her to safety, but as he rolled the big man aside, he found her face was covered in blood, and she was crying and straining, unable to shift the body herself.

‘Mira …?’ he called, wiping her face and straightening her glasses. ‘Are you hurt? Are you okay?’

She came to her senses, reaching for his voice and latching her arms around his neck. ‘What’s happening? Where’s Ben?’

‘Safe. He’s overboard already with Tarin and Gabby.’

Bullets stung the deck around them, and in reflex, he grabbed the nearest Uzi and returned fire, silencing the chatter of machine guns from the bridge.

‘Thanks a lot!’ Patterson shouted as he came to their side. ‘The goal was to capture them.
All
of them, but then you had to go and force my hand, you bloody loner. If I hadn’t enjoyed it so much I should have dropped you too.’

An explosion ripped through the bridge, rocking the ship, and in the flickering light, Lockman saw the dark outlines of two people on the move up there. A flash of lightning revealed them to be Tarin, still aboard and stalking Greggie through the flames with a knife, but Lockman didn’t dare to go after her, even if he could spare the time to get her to safety too. He knew she needed to take care of her own demon.

‘This way,’ Lockman said, ushering Mira to the nearest lifeboat — one glance at the pulley revealing why the others had abandoned it; rusted solid.

A short distance away in the froth-crested waves, he heard the others swimming, calling out to each other, and Gabby shouting for help to keep Ben’s head up from the waves.

Another huge explosion rocked the trawler, as if the flames had worked their way down inside the vessel to the waterline and spewed up debris like an erupting volcano. Lockman swung his body to shield Mira, but fell, taking her to the deck with him. Blood streamed from the back of his head, more down his back, and dazed, he knew dimly that he’d been hit. He felt no more pain and couldn’t summon his body to move or even roll away from her.

Distantly, he heard Mira screaming his name, patting his face, exploring his body with those sweet magical hands — then tugging him, hauling him, rolling him over the damp deck and falling with him through the open gate into the water.

Winded as he struck the surface, he submerged for the longest moment, his lungs burned for air until he popped like a cork to the surface, face-to-face with her, and realised that she’d threaded her arms tightly through the sleeves of his fishing vest, locking her hands behind his shoulders for the fall. She cried out in pain between waves, and kicked away from the sounds of the explosions. Just in time; the trawler groaned and belched as it began to sink. Three more loud splashes disturbed the waves as a final explosion rocked the trawler, also showering them in more debris.

‘I’ve got you,’ she promised between her own gasps for air, but as she tried to pull one hand free of his vest, trying to swim, he knew groggily that something else was very wrong with her — and with him. He could taste his own blood in the water.

‘Leave me,’ he tried to say, fearing a new danger from below. ‘You have to … get away!’

A wave doused them both unexpectedly; her lifejacket barely managing to keep them both afloat in the churning swell. She surfaced again, bedraggled and coughing, and crying out in pain and desperation as she strained in vain to keep his head above water. One arm remained hooked through his vest, and he realised dimly that it caused her more pain with each ebb of the water.

‘Wave,’ he said, warning her just in time to take a breath before they were both swamped again.

Surfacing, a halo of light found her pretty face and he saw her skin glow — her sunshades gone — and her eyes sparkle briefly, like diamonds.

‘Ahoy!’ shouted Finnigan, and through a haze like a dream, Lockman saw the sniper-medic leaning out from the hold of a Blackhawk that swung in overhead and hovered like a dark angel. More searchlights sparkled like fallen stars around them, and he heard more familiar shouts nearby — Detectives Symes and Moser fishing the others from the water onto the lower deck of a gleaming fishing cruiser, while civilian fishing boats of all shapes and sizes raced towards them to join in the search for survivors.

Dimly, as Lockman sensed himself slipping in and out of consciousness, he realised Sergeant Brette had joined them in the thrashing water, and with two others from his team they were striving to disentangle him from Mira, while also masking the taste of his blood with the sweetest oxygen.

‘No!’ Mira pleaded, resisting them and thrashing wildly as they tried to fit her with a mask. ‘Don’t smother me!’

‘She’s delirious,’ said one.

‘She’s blind,’ said Brette. ‘We’ve got you, ma’am. We’re here to help you.’ Lockman sensed her relax a little, though she still didn’t release his fishing vest, as if she couldn’t.

‘I got you, buddy,’ Brette said as they tried to peel Mira away from him, but she screamed out in pain again as well as fear as they fastened a harness around her. ‘We’ve got a lot of blood here!’ Brette shouted. ‘Stay alert up there!’

Lockman felt a heavy thud against his leg. Shots fired, spitting fury at the waves as a winch engaged, lifting Mira away from him.

‘Easy,
easy
!’ Finnigan shouted. ‘Bring her up gently, lads. She’s busted her shoulder.’

Lockman stared skywards, watching her dissolve into the light, and as he slipped back into his own darkness, his last thoughts were of her and how badly he wanted to stay with her.

A
fter a week of living alone in Ben’s home, Mira had lost weight — not because she couldn’t care for herself. Even with her left arm and shoulder bandaged for the first three days, she’d been cooking healthy meals every evening for Gabby using groceries from the fridge and cupboard as a show of appreciation for driving her to the mainland daily to visit Ben and his mother in hospital.

Still, they both refused to see her.

So much for family and togetherness, she thought bitterly. Ben had promised that she’d never need to feel alone, through good times or bad, but now she felt so alone it burned inside like a fever. She could hardly blame him, but she needed to talk to him about it; totally ached for it. She’d tried so many times to break into his ward during Gabby’s visits, the nurses had taken to calling police and banning Mira from the floor and later the building. She’d spent most of her past few visits outside by the road, staring up at his fourth floor window, and if she’d called out more than once, the police would shift her from there too, tearing her apart as they tore her further away from him.

Bodies healed faster than minds, the doctors had warned her during the first attempt, but Ben’s mind wasn’t just bruised or broken like the rest of him. His name may have been cleared finally, but he could no longer bear to look at her without reliving the agony of each and every injury being slowly and maliciously inflicted upon him. Same for his mother, who’d been beaten without ever knowing the real reason. Yet they’d both recovered sufficiently to be sent home with a part-time nurse — and in caring for each other, doctors hoped to accelerate the other healing processes.

‘Sorry,’ Ben had written to Mira on a crumpled scrap of paper. He’d left it by his bedside for Gabby to take and read as his messenger — scrawled painstakingly with his broken fingers. ‘We need time. You’re better off with Lockman anyway.’

Better off?
The words tormented her. Lockman had vanished, whisked away by the same Blackhawk that delivered her back to the airbase hospital. She’d feared far worse for him, since she’d overheard his medics fussing over the shrapnel that had struck him in the spine and skull. She’d tried to convince herself that his fate didn’t matter. He’d told Greppia how little she’d meant to him — and his allegiance was to Garland, while hers was with Ben, at least for as long as it took to regain her independence. Part of her still longed to spend more time with him. Logic told her Lockman should have been as dead to her by now as if he’d drowned in her arms. Yet she mourned for him as much as she yearned for Ben.

It pained her even more to think of Ben struggling to write such a thing — every word etched with the agony of his heart as well as his body — and of him needing more time away from her, more time than the past week. She ached to be with him, needed to help him recover as much as he’d helped her in escaping her own demons at Serenity, but her pleas had all fallen short; passed on by Gabby, or the same doctors and nurses who’d coldly refused her admittance to his room.

Now the only way she had of helping him was by leaving. Her clothes waited on the sofa, a pile stacked neatly alongside her books of Braille poetry and
The Scarlet Pimpernel
; her belongings so meagre that she could fit them all into one small bag. She was taking the toothpaste dispenser; her only thoughtful token from Mel, now one of her most precious possessions. It sat on the piano like a plastic pet bird, alongside Ben’s note that she’d stained yet again with fresh tears. As much as it hurt, she’d tried to glimpse the future; tried to see him fit and well with her living again under the same roof, but her tears came too easily, permitting only brief glimpses ahead too far through the centuries, and often the visions seemed contradictory anyway. His home seemed as likely to become ruins between dunes as a mining museum.

Mira waited for the sun to rise upon her last day in his home, and played the same haunting notes over and again from
Ode to Joy
.

Standing alone as the last note died under her fingers, she’d never felt so unsupervised, and yet so lost and defeated.

Outside, she heard the familiar patter of a diesel engine arrive, then shift into neutral and idle expectantly in the driveway.

‘Ready?’ Gabby called, as she entered through the front security screen using Ben’s key. ‘I can drop you off at Serenity on my way to collect them.’

Mira closed her eyes, hardly able to bear it. The further she’d travelled from Serenity, the more she’d sensed her shadow stretching back to it like elastic. The snap seemed more than a week overdue, but all her calls to Matron Sanchez kept diverting to her mobile phone, which remained unanswered, and if she couldn’t speak to Maddy, there was no other staff who knew her secret. She didn’t want to speak to any of them.

‘You’re welcome to stay with me on my sloop,’ Gabby offered, ‘and before you remind me about your seasickness, remember I also rent a cheap van with a carport for my car and other gear. It has its own bathroom and kitchen, and I could certainly do with a van mate to share expenses for the next six weeks while I’m suspended from duty.’

‘I wish I could.’ Mira closed her eyes as she closed the cover on the keyboard. ‘Unfortunately … ha, there’s a word, I can’t even afford to buy a cheap pair of sunglasses.’

‘You’re rich, I heard? Fifty or sixty million?’

‘Technically, maybe. Oh, Gabby, please believe me. I’d pay to replace the
Edukitty
if I could — I’d do anything to help you get your job back sooner than Garland can, but I can’t access any of my money. I’ve even lost all my pocket change.’

‘You make it sound like you’re a vagrant.’

‘Worse. I’m dead, officially. And even if I wasn’t, I’d need someone else’s signature before I could withdraw so much as five cents.’ Mira collected her clothes, feeling miserable to the depth of becoming numb. ‘There’s only one place for me, and I suppose the sooner I go back, the sooner Ben and Mel can come home to recuperate.’

‘You haven’t heard from Lieutenant Lockman?’

‘Lance corporal,’ Mira replied mechanically. ‘I had as much luck finding out what happened to him as we did trying to find which vet had the joey — if any. And even if he is still alive, he’ll be stationed hours away by now, on the far side of the ranges with the only two doctors who’ve ever been able to help me.’

‘Wow, really?’ Gabby opened the door as she led the way outside. ‘That’s not what I heard.’

Mira froze in the doorway, fearing the worst. ‘What did you hear?’

‘I quit,’ Lockman answered from the driveway. ‘Although discharged is the official story.’

Relief overwhelmed her at the sound of his voice, and yet she remained overshadowed by the guilt of all the hardship and injury she’d caused him. Now this. ‘You’ve lost your job too?’

He chuckled and approached slowly, his stride betraying a limp. ‘I needed more time for fishing.’

‘Time to recuperate, you mean. How badly are you hurt this time?’

‘No worse than my last brush with Kitching. Don’t blame yourself. I wasn’t discharged for medical reasons, Mira. I
asked
to leave, and General Garland bent a few rules to oblige me.’

She grinned to hear her own name on his lips, and with no hint of resentment after all the trouble she’d caused him. ‘You left the army
voluntarily
?’

‘With an honourable discharge,’ Gabby added. ‘It’ll be headlines by tomorrow. He’s being hailed as a hero, and rightly so.’

‘That’s mainly politics,’ Lockman said, taking Mira’s free hand gently in his and rubbing it. ‘No big deal. Hail a hero while hiding the dirty secrets. I’ve been a scapegoat before, so I know how it works. At least this time I wasn’t charged with any murders.’

‘Murder?’ Gabby and Mira asked together.

‘At Chloe’s penthouse, I was luckier than I deserved to be. Private property and I wasn’t authorised to be there, but Tarin Sei and Emmett Patterson both testified that four of Greppia’s men killed themselves before I got there. Tarin wouldn’t mind coming to visit you both, by the way, just as soon as she’s out of hospital.’

‘She survived?’ Mira asked, astounded.

‘Promoted. Garland offered her a choice of sweet assignments.’

‘I sent her a room full of flowers,’ Gabby said. ‘All the things Ben told me she did, trying to keep up his spirits, even when she was in a bad way herself. What a woman!’

‘No thanks to the Greppias and that slimebag Constable Moser,’ Mira said.

‘Could have been worse,’ Lockman replied. ‘Penance is still pending for that dirty cop, although his brother and the other Fed detective escorted him south over the border to kick-start a new career for him via a stint in the military — courtesy of General Garland, naturally. She’s still hunting Colonel Kitching and Mr Mystery, so no doubt she’s got plans afoot for using one slimebag to find another, so to speak.’

‘I don’t understand why she killed her last opportunity using the snipers,’ Mira replied. ‘One minute we were fighting for our lives, and the next the whole crew dropped dead around us. I’ve never heard anything like it.’

‘I can explain that,’ Lockman said. ‘I need to show you something else anyway … Gabby, do you mind if I take her home this morning?’

‘Sure, Adam. I can take Ben’s car to the hospital. It’s a sweet ride since that nice general returned it.’

‘She’s not nice,’ Mira argued. ‘And since when are you two on a first-name basis?’

‘Since he saved our lives.’ Gabby hugged Lockman goodbye first, then Mira, making her feel all the more lonely and disconnected. She listened to the garage door roll open and waved numbly as Gabby drove away, then realised she’d only heard one vehicle arrive in the first place.

‘Did you two come together?’

‘Nothing gets past you.’ He led her to the idling vehicle.

Paying closer attention to the sound of the engine, she realised it sounded less familiar than she’d first realised — more like his Hilux than Gabby’s Landcruiser — and as he helped her up into the invisible seat, she realised the height from the ground was different too, and inside smelled like nothing she’d ever known. It smelled new and oddly welcoming.

‘New car?’ she asked.

‘First prize in the Straddie Classic.’

‘You
won
?’

Instead of answering, he closed her door, limped around the front of the car and climbed in behind the wheel, but she wasn’t letting him off so easily when she needed answers to so many other important questions.

‘How could you win, when the competition finished last week?’

‘I was the bait.’ He chuckled and gunned the engine. ‘Do you remember the shots fired from those two Blackhawks that came in for the airlift? Finnigan stopped a seven-metre Great White from making a snack of me. The second chopper used a gas-powered grappling hook to drag off the carcass as a lure to keep the other sharks busy until everyone was out of the water. Damn thing weighed over a tonne, and that was after the feeding frenzy.’

‘Spoils of urban war?’ she asked.

‘I guess you could say that. Team effort, but there’s only one set of keys — and Garland threatened to paint it army green. Finnigan wasn’t too happy about that, until she handed out the commendations, brownie points and next round of assignments. For them, the war’s not over.’ He turned right onto the East Coast Road and headed south for the ferry, leaving a long silence hanging in the air that warned the war wasn’t over for her either.

‘Hey, reach behind my seat,’ he said. ‘There’s a little friend in a pouch back there who’ll be happy to see you.’

‘Josie …?’ Mira reached back and found the wallaby, immediately noticing that she’d begun to grow fur, and wasn’t napping, just sucking her claw. ‘Where have you been, baby? Nasty man been hiding you? I’ve been searching all week.’ Mira kissed and cuddled the joey, and the joey responded by licking her cheek.

‘She comes to “Pockets” now, sorry. That other name; it wasn’t working.’

‘You couldn’t have dropped me a line to let me know she was safe? I’ve been worried sick!’

‘I thought you’d have your hands full enough with Ben.’

‘He won’t see me.’

‘Yeah? Me neither.’ He shifted gears and reversed out of the driveway.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said as he shifted gears again and sped off down the dirt track as if it was a highway. ‘Why would
you
want to see him?’

‘Unfinished business. I needed to know how much better he was after the ship.’

‘You care about him that much?’

‘Indirectly. Yeah, I guess you could say that.’

‘So you only came looking for him today?’

He didn’t answer for a long moment, and she could tell he was watching her more than he should have been.

‘Watch the road,’ she warned.

He chuckled. ‘You’ve nailed me again. How do you do that?’

‘I asked you a question first.’

‘Yeah, you did.’ He sighed, then slewed around a corner at speed, but he didn’t make it far before he braked to a halt in the middle of the road. ‘I came to see you.’

‘Yeah, well thanks for the joey.’

‘Not just that. You saved me,’ he said, as if she’d surprised him again. ‘Twice. You busted your shoulder getting me off that boat and you lied to keep me out of that tube. You lied for
me
.’

‘Fat lot of good it did us.’

‘That’s not the point. I know how you feel about lies — what you risk losing of yourself once you start down that track, and I just wanted …
needed
really, to thank you personally.’ His hand caressed her cheek, making her flinch. ‘I just needed to know how you’re doing.’

She wished she could lie now and say she was doing fine, but he’d have to be blind not to see that she was barely holding herself together.

‘Movement helps … Can we go please? I don’t care where. I just need to be going somewhere.’

‘Sure. Is slower okay?’

‘Slower’s good. I’ve had my fill of the fast lane for a while.’