War Lord Read online

  ‘Yeah. Move up the beach quickly,’ Grubb advised. ‘Away from the water’s edge.’

  I had no intention of hanging around collecting shells. I shouldered a pack with built-in camelback. Petinski likewise had her gear and water supply in a pack slung over her shoulder.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  Grubb eyed the water behind our boat, standing his ground like he was covering our retreat. I climbed up onto the hull, went to the bow and jumped. My boots disappeared into the soft mud, which made farting sounds as I pulled one foot then the other clear of it, using the anchor line for support. When I reached the scrub, I stopped to catch my breath and sucked in some insects along with the oxygen, swarms of them buzzing furiously around my head. Gagging, I spat the things out. Ahead, Nolngu materialized from behind a screen of scrub and waved at me to come toward him. Easier said than done. The ground stopped being mud and had turned into a bed of rotting desiccated bush. Something snapped dully under my next footfall and I sank up to my knee in the bed of powdered twigs.

  ‘Can I get past?’ said Petinski impatiently as she pushed on by, stepping lightly on the rotting vegetation.

  I dragged myself up and out of the decaying ground one step at a time and eventually found solid footing, my shirt and hat soaked with sweat, the repellent stinging my eyeballs. I drank a mouthful of warm water from the camelback, spat some into my hands and rinsed my eyes. Petinski and Nolngu had gone on ahead, tired of waiting. I caught up with them standing among the buckled, twisted remains of a largish twin turboprop Beech Super King Air spread around the side of the hill. The plane was broken into half a dozen large pieces, the T-tail ripped off the fuselage along with one complete wing, the fuse itself broken into three. Bits of gnarled aluminum skin and hunks of foam insulation and wiring were scattered everywhere. Petinski had a Canon in her hands, and she began photographing everything. Grubb came through the scrub behind us, the Remington slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Shit,’ was all he said, looking around, taking in the destruction.

  I caught up with Petinski as she climbed the hill to get a view looking down on the wreckage. ‘Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ I said when she stopped climbing. Petinski ignored me and kept taking photos. ‘Where’s your team?’ It had gradually dawned on me. Would Uncle Sam send her all the way down here by herself to investigate the accident?

  ‘What team?’

  ‘The Aussies are sending a team. But the NTSB has sent just you. You don’t even have a partner. You must have a partner.’

  ‘I work on my own.’

  ‘What sort of Myers-Briggs indicators do I need to win that jackpot?’

  Petinski stopped clicking away with her Canon to scowl at me. ‘Can I do my job here? Please?’

  ‘And what is your job, exactly?’

  ‘You’re watching me do it. Now, if you don’t mind . . .’

  ‘Seriously, who gets to work on their own?’

  She kept up the scowl. ‘I’m the advance party, making initial observations before adverse weather sets in – document the scene, take photos. Working on my own, I can move faster. Be nimble, flexible.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘The NTSB has some more investigators joining the Australian team. Teams take time to organize.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now, can I get back to work?’

  ‘Who’s stopping you?’

  Petinski’s eyes flashed a couple of shades of blue at me, changing color the way a squid does when it’s angry, before returning to her viewfinder.

  ‘So what do you see?’ I asked her.

  ‘Cooper . . .’

  ‘Just asking.’

  ‘You’re not a good advertisement for partnership, you know that?’ Petinski swept the wreckage with her camera several times. ‘Okay, well, what I’m seeing that I think might be significant . . . the landing gear is up but the flaps are down. And see the engine on that wing?’ She gestured with her camera at the buckled stub of riveted aluminum still attached to the fuselage. ‘The propeller’s feathered. Same as the prop on the other engine. That says to me that Randy had no power but had enough time to get set up for a dead-stick landing. He made a decision to put it down here, rather than on dry land. I have no idea why he didn’t make a Mayday call. Maybe he did, but it wasn’t picked up. This aircraft had VHF and UHF radios, so I don’t know why it wouldn’t have been. Maybe by the time he got around to it he was too low. Looking at the physical evidence, he obviously tried to land on the river, gear up. But he might have misjudged it, maybe came in a little fast, skipped off the water like a stone, hit the mangroves followed by the trees and the hill.’

  I took in the scene, looking back toward the river. The mangroves and trees were damaged pretty much in a line that joined up with the dark green river beyond. Petinski’s hypothesis fit. ‘And the cause?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s why they’re sending in that team you’re so hot for.’ Petinski brought the Canon back to her eye, peeled off a bunch of shots. ‘I’ll give you an educated guess when I’ve finished nosing around, okay? And please don’t touch anything. Think of this as a crime scene. Now, if you don’t mind . . .’

  I could take a hint. We went our separate ways, Petinski continuing up her own ass, me down the hill toward the broken fuselage. The nose was punched in on the co-pilot’s side. Randy was lucky to have walked away from this one – albeit briefly. I stepped between the separated tubular sections of the fuselage, the one just behind the flight deck, the two sections still joined by umbilical cords of wiring, cables and hydraulic lines. The air smelled vaguely of jet fuel. I could see the backs of the pilot and co-pilot seats. Flies buzzed in the air, interested in black coagulated blood spatter on the smashed instrument panel and a splash of it on the shoulder area of the co-pilot’s seat.

  Petinski arrived, ducked around me, stepped up inside the area behind the seats, and snapped away with her camera. Somewhere along the way, she’d put on a pair of rubber surgical gloves. Her camera dangled around her neck while she slipped blue crime-scene covers over her boots.

  ‘When you said don’t touch anything, I didn’t realize trampling was okay,’ I said.

  ‘I’m trained for this – are you?’ She climbed over the console between the seats and disappeared from view.

  ‘What do you see?’ I asked her.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Abrupt, blunt, aloof, snooty, humorless, uncommunicative ice maiden.

  ‘This crate equipped with black boxes?’ I asked her.

  ‘Has a cockpit voice recorder as standard. Flight data recorder was an option and the registered owner has informed us that the option wasn’t installed.’

  ‘That’s Ty Morrow.’

  ‘Mr Morrow, yes.’

  ‘The recorder in the tail?’

  ‘That’s where they always are.’

  ‘You wanna go get it?’ I asked her.

  ‘No, I’m not touching it.’

  ‘You don’t want to get a photo of it, for the album maybe?’

  ‘Busy here, Cooper.’

  I looked back toward the rear. More wires, cabling, crushed and twisted metal. Lashed against the side of the fuselage was a life raft canister, mandatory equipment for over-water flights. It could’ve transported the pilot safely down the river, and the survival gear that came with it would’ve come in handy too.

  ‘See any personal effects up there – a suitcase or sausage bag?’ I asked. ‘Randy would’ve had a change of clothes with him, toiletries.’

  ‘No.’

  I supposed he could have taken his things with him when he left the scene. Maybe there was a bull shark swimming around, about to shit a Samsonite. The blood spatter indicated injury. Maybe the pilot had a head wound and he was dazed, disoriented, which might have explained why he didn’t use the raft. Whatever the reason, he’d wandered down to the water and decided to swim for it. Bad decision.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Petinski.

  ‘What you got?’


  She held up a large document wallet then unzipped it, examined the contents.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Passport, FAA security pass, FAA license. All in the name of Randy Sweetwater. The photos are consistent. They’re Randy’s.’

  ‘Or forgeries,’ I suggested. Petinski didn’t respond to that. Assuming they weren’t, the documents said Randy was behind the wheel. Was it unusual that he would leave the scene of the crash with his clothes but not his ID? Maybe. People often behaved irrationally under intense stress. I once pulled a woman from a house fire who wouldn’t leave because she couldn’t find a pair of socks in her washing basket to put on.

  Looking around, I noticed a collection of magazines wedged in the space between the pilot seat and fuselage, jammed there by an aluminum rib bent out of shape. I reached forward and, working them up and down, eventually pulled them free. Six glossy magazines. ‘Hey, Petinski, you found any moisturizer up there?’ I said, flicking through them.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Moisturizer. You found any?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about tissues?’

  She popped her head up, curious. I showed her the magazines, which brought on a look of supreme distaste.

  ‘Inflight entertainment,’ I said. ‘I don’t recognize the language, although her I understand in any language.’ I held up a spread of a naked black woman doing the splits; she reminded me a little of Sugar if I looked at the page with a squint.

  ‘Show me that,’ Petinski demanded, climbing back over the center console. I handed over the mag and she examined the spread intently.

  ‘Something wrong?’ I asked. There seemed to be.

  ‘This . . . this woman here. Her name’s Emanuel. She’s an Olympic gymnast, or was. Brazilian.’ Petinski shook her head, disappointed. ‘Mani . . . She was a finalist in the uneven bars.’

  ‘You sound like you know her,’ I said, having difficulty hiding the sloppy grin spreading across my face.

  ‘Knew her. I was on the US team.’

  ‘You were an Olympic gymnast?’ That explained her body type, at least from the waist down.

  ‘My specialty was the floor. Rolled my ankle in a warm-up session the first day of competition. And that was the end of me.’ She shook her head with dismay, apparently as much at seeing a fellow champion gymnast plying a new trade as at the memory of her own career. ‘Mani was good.’

  ‘She still is, in a bad kinda way, if you know what I mean.’

  Petinski did, and she wasn’t impressed. ‘Where’d you find this?’ she snapped. ‘I told you not to touch anything!’

  I showed her. Botox wouldn’t have budged the frown on her face. ‘Did Randy speak Portuguese?’ she asked.

  ‘No, as far as I know he didn’t. Though I’m sure that if he did, he wouldn’t have brought those along to read. Hence my question about the moisturizer.’

  Petinski pursed her lips. ‘You’re disgusting.’

  ‘And you’ve got nice-looking friends.’

  ‘Just because these magazines are here,’ she said, ‘doesn’t mean Randy brought them on board. As he didn’t speak Portuguese, that suggests to me a previous pilot or passenger left them behind.’

  A reasonable assumption, but it was also not impossible that, despite the presence of his FAA license and so forth, perhaps Randy wasn’t the pilot at all and that someone else was, a Brazilian maybe, who brought the pornos along to help pass the time. Unreasonable, it seemed to me, was Petinski gravitating to a particular view about it while so readily excluding other likely theories along the way.

  ‘I’m taking them back with me,’ I said, holding my hand out, wiggling my fingers, gesturing at her to hand them over.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s a long trip.’

  Nine

  A thin female pathologist with gothic makeup and lank purple hair accompanied Coroner Jim Hunt. Detective Inspector Grubb, Petinski and I stood on the opposite side of the stainless-steel dissection table and all of us were staring at what was laid out on it: a small portion of skull and spine, a few ribs, a butt cheek and scrotum, some thigh, and an arm with hand attached.

  ‘He’s not your bloke,’ said Hunt.

  ‘You’re sure about that?’ Grubb asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You still don’t have his records,’ said Petinski.

  ‘No, but you and Vin both said Sweetwater was a little over six feet two inches.’

  I nodded.

  Petinski nodded.

  ‘This fella’s a short arse,’ Hunt continued. ‘Five eight in his socks.’

  Hmm. I stared at the remains. This didn’t come as such a surprise after the contradictory items we’d found in the plane wreck, but it did raise a bunch of questions, such as how someone who wasn’t Randy Sweetwater came to have Randy’s watch, wallet and documentation. Why had he taken Randy’s place in the King Air’s pilot seat? Had it been done under duress? And was the plane’s crash due to random accidental factors, or was it somehow brought down with intent, linked in some way to Randy, the severed hand and the ransom note – some kind of botched cover-up, maybe? I didn’t have any answers and if Petinski did, she was reluctant to confide. Still, I could now inform Alabama that her boyfriend hadn’t become an entrée – at least not down here in a northern Australian swamp. And the focus would again return to Thing, the ring and the ransom note FedExed from an address in Brazil. Was Randy Sweetwater still alive and kicking? Maybe he was, and maybe he wasn’t. It was hard to deny though that there were pieces of body claiming to be Randy Sweetwater scattered all over the planet, and none of them appeared to fit together.

  The fingertips of the hand attached to the arm on the pathology table were inked blue-black. ‘Where’ve you sent the prints?’ I asked.

  ‘The United States Department of Defense,’ said Hunt.

  ‘You mind forwarding a set to my boss?’ I wrote Arlen’s email address at Andrews AFB on the back of my OSI card.

  The coroner took the card and examined it under his bifocals. ‘No problem.’

  ‘And to my office, please,’ said Petinski.

  Jim Hunt assured us that the detailed forensic analysis of the remains would also be sent to both our respective offices, and then the meeting concluded. Hunt brought his hands together and gave them a rub. ‘Who’s coming to the pub? Grubby?’

  ‘Jeez, is it that late?’ The DI glanced at his watch. ‘Bloody oath.’

  It was ten-thirty in the morning.

  ‘Kim? Vin?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m on vacation.’

  Petinski waved him away. ‘Love to, but I have to write up a report.’

  Love to? Seemed to me Petinski was keen to exit the immediate area forthwith.

  ‘When are you leaving?’ I asked her.

  ‘Soon,’ she said.

  ‘When, exactly?’

  She drew a deep breath. ‘One a.m.’

  ‘Qantas to LAX. We must be on the same flight. Maybe we can get our seating changed – sit together?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She managed to make it sound like, ‘I’ll scream if they try.’

  ‘Come for a Diet Coke.’

  ‘Can’t, sorry. I have to make some calls. And I wasn’t lying about the report. I want to write it up here in case I have questions.’

  Questions were all I had. Now that there was some closure on these remains, I also had a call to make to Alabama.

  Petinski gave Hunt, Grubb, the Goth and me a curt goodbye, and walked out the door. I watched her go and thought: an abrupt, blunt, aloof, snooty, humorless, uncommunicative, teetotaling, former Olympic ice maiden . . . with hot friends who did porn. The universe does love balance.

  *

  It was on the approach to LAX that I found myself waking up beside Petinski in economy, a deep-vein-thrombosis leg stocking balled up and stuffed in my mouth.

  ‘You were snoring,’ she said as I pulled the thing out hand over hand like I was part of some magician’s a
ct. I thanked her for her understanding and drank a bottle of water to wash away the taste of cotton.

  ‘You talk in your sleep, you know that?’ she said eventually, after we’d landed and were taxiing to the jetway.

  ‘Did I say anything sensible?’

  ‘What do you think?’ she answered out the corner of her mouth, no eye contact. ‘You did say something about coincidences, and that you didn’t believe in them. You were talking very loud and acting out, pushing the coincidences away – at least, I think that’s what you were doing. The flight attendant and I had to restrain you. What were you drinking?’

  ‘I’ve been drinking?’ I said. I gave the back of my neck a one-handed massage. It felt like someone had worked over my cerebellum with a blunt instrument. Those Aussies sure were a thirsty bunch.

  Petinski pursed her lips and fussed with some personal effects, keen to get up and out, the conga line down the aisle finally starting to shuffle.

  I pushed myself out of the seat and stood up, swaying a little.

  ‘If you’re looking for your bag, it’s in the overhead locker,’ Petinski said, nodding in the general direction. ‘So, you don’t believe in coincidences?’

  If I wasn’t feeling like something had coughed me up, then I could have given her an eloquent lecture on this belief system of mine. But instead I collected my bag and concentrated on not hurling.

  ‘Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous, you know,’ she persisted.

  ‘And I don’t believe in him, either,’ I managed to say. ‘Unless I’m in a fix.’

  ‘You always so sure of yourself, Cooper?’ she asked me as I moved forward. I didn’t answer. All I was sure of was that if she didn’t stop talking then I really was going to heave. Maybe she knew that and was just having fun. Wait, I’d already established that Petinski had no sense of humor. I concentrated on the guy in front of me, and moved forward when he did.

  Petinski and I got separated from each other at customs and immigration and I didn’t get the opportunity to say goodbye, not officially, but I was feeling way too seedy to care. I had half an hour to make the connecting flight to Vegas, so I stopped off at the head, donated the contents of my stomach, and swore I wouldn’t drink again – at least not till the next time I drank. I bought another bottle of water and some breath mints and made the Continental flight as the last of the passengers were checking through the gate. I sat in an aisle seat, kept my head down, and snoozed away the short flight to McCarran. Things looked brighter with the extra sleep and I managed to get in a few pleasant thoughts about the pool area at Bally’s before I heard a familiar voice behind me as I stepped from the Boeing’s hatch into the jetway.