The Steam Mole Page 5

  Well, he’d just have to play dead and get dumped with the corpses. In the huge prison compound there were at least four or five every day, victims of the tropical heat and diseases. Jack knew the Empire put scanty value on their lives. He was just puzzled as to why they bothered to have a camp here, where even the warders suffered. Prisoners arrived, and prisoners were taken away. And when they went, they didn’t come back.

  Jack’s plans were cast into turmoil again when he found himself being leg ironed and forced to shuffle out of the camp attached to six other prisoners. He was going to find out for himself just where the prisoners went.

  They did not have to walk far. The railway line had a crude roof over it, with a narrow slit in it to allow smoke out. The prisoners were herded onto cattle trucks going west. The manacles were locked onto the bars of the truck and the guards retreated to a caboose that gushed out a fog of cold air as they opened the door.

  “Freezer wagon. For meat. Hope the bastards get stuck in it and freeze,” said his neighbor on the line of manacles, a dark-skinned man with lank, curly hair. Jack guessed him to be one of the aboriginals. Quite a lot of the prisoners were black.

  “So where are we going?” Jack asked. It was no time, yet, for the infamous Jack Calland sense of humor. He needed serious answers first.

  “Work on the railway,” said his companion in a tone of voice he might have used if he’d said “step out in front of the firing squad.”

  It soon became apparent that this was pretty much exactly what it did mean. Jack’s fellow prisoners knew very little about this railway going to the west. Except that no one came back, and only the irredeemable had gone…at first. Now, they were sending everyone. Even those who’d got drunk and been in town after curfew and got into a punch up with the police, like his new chain companion, Quint.

  “So what did you do, man?” asked Quint.

  That was an interesting question. “Headed up the efforts to destroy the British Empire’s hold over Ireland,” was an answer he’d avoided giving so far. Protesting innocence might not be a good idea either. This was a one-way trip, and it was unlikely Quint was a spy. “I’m Irish. I was involved in the rebellion.”

  “Yeah. Seen a few o’ your kind.”

  It didn’t sound as though he was too happy about the experience. But then, this was not a place for joyous meetings. It was dark, hot, and the air smoky. The “tunnel,” with its hand’s width of gap in the roof, did keep off the direct sun, but that was all you could say for it. Jack was an engineer by training, and it all reeked of haste and incompetence. It wasn’t that strong, he was sure. And the rail the leg irons were attached to was barely a quarter inch of mild steel, if he was any judge. A hastily welded rod to convert a cattle truck into a prisoner transport.

  “Have you thought about escape?” he asked Quint.

  “Don’t be stupid. Where are you gunna go? And we’re chained together.” Quint paused, then asked, “I suppose you got a file?”

  Something about the pause, and the spying within the prison in New Dublin, made Jack pause himself. “Just wondering.”

  He kept his peace after that, squatting down and surreptitiously testing the bar. It bent a little…

  Later, when the train stopped and warders came with water buckets, he learned just how wise he’d been not to speak further.

  “He’s talking about escaping,” said his neighbor to the warder with the bucket. It was a very valuable bucket of water. It came from the refrigeration truck—not out of kindness, Jack suspected, but just because that was where the warders were. The warders walked down the line with a trusty and a bucket. You had the time it took for them to walk it to take a dipper and scoop and drink and get it to the man next to you to use—and heaven help you if you took too long to drink and the next man missed out. He’d probably kill you, and the warders wouldn’t stop him.

  The warder paused, enabling Jack’s treacherous neighbor to steal another dipper full of that glorious cold water. “Yeah? Ponty, you better search this one.” He poked Jack with his club. And there was no water for him.

  Ponty—a flat-faced warder with long, thin, hard fingers—hauled Jack up by the hair, from where he sat slumped against the wall. Jack was last in the chain-gang group. “Yer looks like trouble,” he said, digging fingers into anyplace a prisoner could hide anything.

  It could have been awkward if Jack had had anything for him to find. As it was, he was just searched, roughed up a bit, and missed his chance at a drink of cold water.

  “Escape,” the tall man with the odd accent had said, “escape.” Up to now Lampy Green had only been thinking of dying.

  He shouldn’t have done it. If he’d thought about what might happen he wouldn’t have. If he’d known that it would lead to him being chained like a dog, he would have just walked away.

  But actually, he knew he wouldn’t have. Part of him hated himself to the core. The bastard had been his father. He shouldn’t have done it. But when he’d come home with a stolen sheep, and his father laid into her with the stock whip, and she ran to him. And the axe had been there. If he hadn’t fought with his father. If his father hadn’t been drunk. If his father’s woman hadn’t put the blame on him. If he’d run instead of trying to stop the bleeding. If the mutton carcass hadn’t been there.

  If.

  If he could get out of here, they’d never take him alive. Not in all his fifteen years had he been so afraid, so…imprisoned.

  When they locked him up, he’d started to die.

  He wanted to ask the new prisoner on their shackle line just how he thought it could be done. But not while they had a snitch with them. A snitch who’d just proved he would betray any one of them.

  But there was another black man on the line. When Quint was asleep Lampy talked to him. He had to speak English. The man came from the far north.

  “If he can break us out,” said one of the white prisoners, the shifty-looking bastard who stole his bread, “you boongs c’n count me in. They’ll work us until we die here. Me and the rest of us, except that Quint. He rats on us, we’ll kill him.”

  Lampy had no trouble believing him.

  Other men might have taken it out on the man who did this to them. Jack just stored it away. Knowing who would rat, who could be used to feed false information to the authorities, was also useful. But plainly it was terrifying the fellow next to him. The fink was obviously aiming for a place as a trusty. When the bread came around he whined about being threatened for trying to help the warders.

  It didn’t do him a whole lot of good, for reasons that became obvious a little later. The train stopped and they were herded and prodded off…to the reason that prisoners didn’t come back from this trip.

  It was not so much brutality, or murderous desire, but that the facts of this place must not leak out. It was brutal, of course. Some of the men hadn’t even survived the trip, and the soldiers who took over herding the prisoners showed no mercy. One of the men in their cattle truck had lapsed into unconsciousness. The guards simply chopped his legs off and shot the bleeding, dying man. It provided a horrific lesson to the rest of the prisoners.

  They had been taken to a military camp. A large military camp, heavily camouflaged. What was happening there was plain to Jack’s eye, thanks to his experience in Ireland. This was a build-up of men and materiel for some kind of attack. It could only be on something in Westralia.

  Jack had a good grasp of geography. But no one really knew just what lay in the vast deserts and semi-deserts of central Australia, besides heat that could kill a man. There were mines of great wealth there. Jack knew there was gold and iron to be had, just for a start.

  It must be a prize worth a lot to the British Empire. There were, by his rough calculation, billets for maybe four thousand men in the camp. And there was a build-up in the marshaling yard they’d been disembarked at, trains and carriages, and, as he saw a little later, a fleet of trucks. The Hussars and Dragoons in their tropical undress kit intended to
strike hard and fast, somewhere. They weren’t colonial troops. These were elite men, out from England itself, sharpening up for an attack.

  And somewhere soon.

  The British Empire didn’t care if prisoners died for no real reason or gain, but the British Army was a little less wasteful of its men, especially if it had shipped or flown them halfway around the world for this.

  The reason they had begun taking any prisoners, and not just the few with death sentences, for the chain gangs, carrying sleepers and laying down track under the eyes of soldier-guards, was also quite obvious to Jack, within hours: They were pushing hard. Pushing to get to the last staging post before the vehicles could make their final stab across the desert.

  Jack was no one’s fool, except, at times, his own. In a way this meant the railway hard-labor gangs were no longer a work-until-you-die sentence. When they’d finished here, the British Army wouldn’t care who knew about it anymore.

  His fellow prisoners on the gang of seven, leg ironed together, didn’t know that, though. All they saw was grueling work with little food, barely enough water, and other prisoners dying and being shot like dogs.

  About a third of the prisoners were aboriginals or, like Quint, part aboriginal. They got it from both sides. The soldiers treated everyone badly, and them, if anything, worse. The white Australian prisoners tended to take it out on them, too. The kid in their line was a youngster, barely more than a boy, who was even blacker than Quint, and he was having the worst time of it. Deloraine, who’d obviously been a thief, stole the kid’s bread ration the first day. Jack gave the kid half of his, meager though it was. He couldn’t watch the boy watch him eat, even if he knew he needed his own strength. The others noticed. And the next time there was none of that, although Jack was watching. Quint was again doing his best to kiss up to the guards, but there was little chance to do so. He might have been hoping for a soft job as a trusty. The rest had seen what was happening out there, and weren’t wanting anything but away. Plainly, they talked among themselves. Jack was awakened by a quiet shaking from the next man along from Deloraine, a full-blood aboriginal man that no one messed with. “Irishman. You talk ’bout escape?”

  “That was on the train. The bar could have been broken. But yes. I’m for it. Just trying to work out how.”

  “Donner and me and Parsee, Deloraine and Lampy, we all ready to take a chance wi’ you. The country out there is a killer, man. And they got dogs for hunting us. But it feels like we’re in for a wet. If we’re going to make a break, we need to do it soon, in the rain. You break us loose, we’ll go ’long.”

  Deep in the desert Tim Barnabas dreamed of rain. His mind must have been a bit messed up by breathing bad air, being nearly frightened to death, and maybe even the bump he’d taken on his head. Somehow, he’d lost the low hump of ground that indicated the termite run. It was quite rugged terrain out here, not the miles of flat sand he’d thought he’d find. The sky was a dirty red. The wind wuthered among the rocks and scattered dry, yellow shreds of grass. There were the scattered, twisted, wind-desiccated bones of trees here for him to fall over, too.

  He really wasn’t sure where he was going. His head throbbed and his mouth was dry, but at least he wasn’t sweating so much anymore. Surely that must be good.

  It was just so hot.

  Eventually he stopped staggering along and took some shelter from the sun under the overhang of a large boulder. He lay there, looking at the cracks and shades of red, and watched them twine and make strange patterns before his eyes. It was slightly cooler under the rock—anything was better than the beating sun. Mind you, that was half hidden in blowing dust, a fierce red disk up in the sky.

  Tim must have slipped away into a sort of sleep, or at least unconsciousness, because when he woke up he was shivering with cold and it was dark, and his head wasn’t quite such a mess. He was still desperately thirsty.

  He was pretty sure that he’d come from that direction…he’d certainly crawled under the rock from it. And therefore, logically, if he walked back that way, he’d come out at the mound that marked the termite run. If he walked along it, only at night, he had to come out at the power station, and water. The mole had been on its way back. That was why he’d been so busy trying to finish his letter to Clara, to put it with the mail on the supply train returning to Sheba. It couldn’t be more than six…seven miles, surely. Walking at night was the right thing to do. He could manage seven miles.

  Somehow.

  If he was walking the right direction.

  The sky was hazy, so he couldn’t even use the stars to navigate by.

  And walking straight…well, that was out of the question. It was broken, stony ground. And dark.

  He just had to do his best.

  Slow but steady.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d been making that slow but steady progress, with occasional falls, when the moon came up.

  Tim’s head was in that exhausted, cloudy zone where nothing made much sense except to put one foot in front of the other. At first he was just grateful for the extra light. There were scrubby bushes here to fall over, too, but then something struck him as wrong.

  He’d learned navigation on the submarine. It had been one of the subjects he’d needed for his submariner’s ticket. The moon rises in the east.

  He was walking the wrong way. Except…except, had he walked east or west when he first wandered away from the termite run?

  He honestly didn’t know. His head was whirling.

  So thirsty.

  And there were more of these bushes, and even a tussock to fall over between the stones. He chose the path of least resistance, no longer caring if he walked straight or east or west. Just…one foot in front of the other.

  And then things got worse. He fell into a hole. A sandy, scrabbly edged hole, far deeper than he was tall.

  He tried to clamber out of it, too weak to grab the crumbly edge and haul himself up. He slipped and fell again, and for a while he just lay there.

  And then it dawned on him that his face was laying on something damp.

  Damp…in the desert.

  That gave him, from somewhere deep inside, a spurt of energy and clarity he’d thought lost to him forever.

  Damp sand in a hole…It was definitely damp, sticking together the way the sand on the edge of the pit had not.

  On his knees, Tim dug—he could feel the damp through the knees of his dungarees now. He scraped away sand. And more wet sand. And more.

  Eventually he stopped. He wondered if he could try sucking the water out of the sand. After a few minutes he sighed to himself and tried to swallow around his swollen tongue, then reached into the hole to start again. He was down nearly a full arm-stretch by now.

  He stuck his hand into water.

  It was barely enough to cover his palm.

  It was still water.

  It might have been muddy, but he didn’t begin to care.

  It trickled between his cracked lips.

  Nothing had ever been quite as welcome.

  He could have drunk gallons and gallons of it…except it was a slow process. A little bit of the precious stuff cupped in his fingers to each mouthful, and it seeped in very slowly, too.

  After far too few mouthfuls to slake his thirst, but enough to help his thinking, Tim started on a second, bigger hole, a little farther across. He found a stick to help dig, and it went easier. With two holes he could let one seep while he drank from the other.

  The sky was beginning to pale for another blistering day in the desert by the time Tim had had enough to drink. His head was much clearer, and he started to work things out. This must be a watercourse. Not so much a river as where the floodwater ran when the desert saw rain or run-off from elsewhere. That was why there’d been more vegetation to fall over.

  And the hole…well, someone must have dug it. His feet choosing their own path—the course of least resistance—in his state last night had somehow put him on a trail of some kind, to this
hole that someone must have dug to reach the water.

  Tim had his wits about him enough by now to know that he needed to drink and get himself into as much shade as possible before the sun baked down on this hole. It would be cooler in here for a while yet, but the sky was already a relentless blue, very different from yesterday’s wind-blown red.

  He knew he had to stay out of the sun. He knew a few hours in it could easily kill him. He just didn’t know quite what to do next. He couldn’t stay here forever. And yet…to leave the water was simply terrifying. He steeled himself for at least a clamber out of the pit. Now, in daylight, not in the state he’d been in last night, it wasn’t that difficult. It still left him panting and tired, just that little bit of exertion. But in the morning light he could see that this was indeed a river bed—or had been once in wetter times. Walking, except along the trail he’d stumbled onto, would have been difficult. There were more plants here, even some scrubby coppice-like trees up to seven or eight feet tall, with waxy green leaves. In the distance he heard a bird calling. But there was no sign of which way the termite run was. Tim could tell east and west and north and south, but besides the path he’d followed, he had no idea where any humans might be. It was quite a well-trodden path, though. He wondered if he ought to follow it. Surely it couldn’t be far to wherever the digger of the hole lived. Unless…unless of course it was an animal. Tim literally had no idea what kind of wild animal might live in Australia. It was too far from the tunnels under Drowned London. He needed some kind of weapon. Or fire…

  That would do. People would see the smoke. He should be able to see the smoke of the power station…

  Only he had no means of making fire, and the sky showed no trails of smoke.

  How had he come so far?

  The opportunity to escape came for Jack and his fellow prisoners two days later, thanks to the rain the young aboriginal prisoner, Lampy, had predicted. They were carrying sleepers, and very grateful for that rain and the little bit of cool that came with it. They’d just got back to the pile that had been dumped off the rail car when one of the soldiers pointed to them and said, “Right. You lot. Onto that cattle truck with the gravel. Been a washout at Three-mile Creek.”