Zero Hour

He turned away to halt the offending pallet’s approach, but before he could say a word Joe put his arm around the big man’s shoulders, leaning in close, all friendly-like.

“Now, listen,” Joe said. “I know this is a mistake. And you know it’s a mistake. But if I don’t take these tubs out there in person, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

Joe stuffed a wad of Australian cash into the man’s hand, five hundred dollars in total. “For the inconvenience,” he said, patting his newfound friend on the shoulder.

The loadmaster thumbed through the money, keeping it low and out of sight like a man hiding his cards at the poker table. A smile crept over his face. It was a big payday.

“This is really a waste of time,” he muttered, far more subdued than he’d been before. “But, then again, who are we to question why?”

“My thoughts exactly,” Joe said.

The loadmaster turned and whistled to his crew. “Pull the other pallets off and load her up with this one. And make it quick,” he grumbled. “We’re not getting paid by the hour.”

As the ground crew went to work, a young woman from inside the charter company’s office brought Joe an ice-cold bottle of water. She smiled at him, all dimples and sparkling eyes.

“Thank you,” he said.

“My pleasure, sir.”

She winked and turned with a swish, and Joe had to fight hard to keep himself from following.

He stood and considered the situation. He was accustomed to being covered in grease and neck-deep in the hands-on work. He’d certainly never considered himself the supervisor type. But as he sipped the cool drink and watched from the shade while the heavy cargo pallets were pulled off and rearranged in the strong morning sun, he began to consider it an option.

He straightened his tie and glanced once more at the smiling customer service rep.

“A guy could get used to this.”

A few hours later and a thousand miles away, Kurt Austin waited in the cab of a boxy-looking flatbed. He watched as the CASA-212 landed on the centerline of the tiny Alice Springs Regional Airport and taxied toward him.

As the aircraft eased to a stop, Kurt put the truck in gear and drove up. While the ground crew went to work on the plane, Kurt climbed out of the cab and onto the flatbed. He activated the truck’s hydraulics and tilted the flatbed down until its far edge touched the ground like a ramp. By the time he locked it in place, the ground crew had begun wheeling the pallet with the speeders on it toward him.

Kurt attached a cable to the front of the pallet and used the flatbed’s winch to haul it up on board. After locking it in place, he leveled the flatbed once again and jumped down.

Joe Zavala sauntered out of the aircraft cabin a moment later, wearing a tailored suit and sunglasses.

“Looking sharper than I remember,” Kurt said.

“I’m in management now,” Joe said. “We have to dress for success.”

Kurt chuckled. He and Joe had been friends for years. They’d met at NUMA, finding themselves to be kindred spirits who’d rather be doing anything than sitting around bored. They’d been called troublemakers, undesirables, and been thrown out of at least twenty bars in their lifetimes, though none in the past year or so. But in the often tense and dangerous world that NUMA worked in, there were none better at keeping their cool and getting the job done.

“By the way,” Joe said, “you owe me five hundred dollars.”

Kurt paused at the door. “For what?”

“I had to grease the skids to get these things here.”

Kurt pulled the door open and climbed in. “You’re in management now. Put it on your expense account.”

Joe got in on the other side. “You are my expense account,” he said. “Now, how about telling me what we’re doing out here in the driest of the dry with a truckload of diving equipment.”

“I’ll explain on the road,” Kurt said, starting the engine. “We’re burning daylight.”

They drove off the airport grounds and were soon rumbling west, out of Alice Springs and into the desert.

As they drove, Joe changed his clothes, and Kurt explained the situation, starting with the events in Sydney and his odd meeting with Hayley Anderson and Cecil Bradshaw of the ASIO.

“The courier had red dust on him. It was packed into the mesh of his clothing. Bradshaw called it a palaeosol. It’s very old and infertile and commonly found here in the outback. Half the reason this place is so barren. The dead guy also had a mix of toxic metals on his skin. The kind usually found in mining operations.”

“Again pointing in this direction,” Joe said.

“Exactly,” Kurt said. “The problem was the decompression sickness. I’m certain the guy had the bends, but most of the lakes out here are transient. Even the year-round ones are shallow.”

He motioned to the surroundings. There was nothing but desert and dust in every direction, right out to the horizon.

“And yet, you’ve found a place out here where the water is both deep and poisonous.”

Kurt nodded. “Ever hear of the Berkeley Pit?”

Joe shook his head.

“It’s an open-pit copper mine in Montana. It flooded when the miners went too deep and water began seeping in from aquifers in the surrounding rock. Took years to fill up, but at last check the water was nine hundred feet deep and rising. The minerals give the water an odd color, reddish orange. It’s so toxic that a flock of geese landed there a few years ago and never took off again, promptly dying from exposure to the poisons.”

“Interesting,” Joe said. “But we’re not in Montana anymore, Toto.”

“No, we’re not, Dorothy. But as it turns out, here in Oz the Aussies have a few open-pit mines of their own. The outback is full of them. And some of them appear to be filled with water.”

Joe nodded, he seemed impressed. “I’ll buy that,” he said. “Are they deep enough to cause the bends?”

“Some are deeper than the Berkeley Pit.”

“Maybe you’re onto something,” Joe said. “But even if you are, why on earth would someone be diving in a poisoned lake?”

“Not sure,” Kurt said. “But Bradshaw told me these guys were a threat to Australian national security. And a flooded, toxic mine like this has two attributes that might make it interesting to such conspirators.”

“And those are?”

“For one thing,” Kurt said, “people stay away from toxic lakes that may or may not leak poisonous gas. And for another, they’re hard to see through.”

“You think they’re hiding something in the lake,” Joe said.

“Hiding it very effectively from a world filled with satellites.”

Joe nodded. “Technically, it’s a world surrounded by satellites. But I get your drift.”

Kurt almost laughed. “Thanks for that dose of editorial genius. I’m sure it’ll come in handy when the bullets start flying.”

After two hours on an empty highway, they were a hundred miles from Alice Springs and cruising a secondary dirt road. They hadn’t seen another soul for the last ninety minutes.

Kurt glanced in the mirror. A thick cloud of dust trailed out behind them, enough that they might have been followed from space. But if someone was tailing them, their engine would have choked out long ago.

He slowed the truck. They’d come to a gap in the barbwire fence that ran along the side of the road. An even more primitive trail led through it and off toward a low rise.

“This should be it.”

Turning the wheel to its stops, Kurt maneuvered the big truck through the opening.

“Just so I’m clear,” Joe said, “we have no idea what’s going on. No idea what we’re getting ourselves into. But we’re doing all this because some snotty bureaucrat didn’t like your theory.”

Kurt nodded. “Yep.”

“You have issues, amigo. Starting with a pathological need to prove yourself right.”

“The least of my flaws,” Kurt insisted as they neared the top of the ridge, “but it’s not that they didn’t believe me. They didn’t even take me seriously.”