Dust To Dust

By Lew Deegan

Dust to Dust is an action-packed adventure that rages across Western Australia’s mineral-rich Kimberley and Pilbara.

An underground gold mine in the remote east Kimberley is flooded just eight days after striking the richest gold seam the mine has seen in two generations. With mounting debts, the mine closes and is forced into administration.

Stirling Hooper’s quest to resurrect the abandoned mine is spurned by mining companies and investors alike. Desperate, and with nowhere else to turn, he ends up in a fragile partnership with nefarious local bon vivant, Karl Deperne.

With work to salvage the mine barely underway, Deperne forces Hooper and his fellow shareholders into hijacking a charter flight carrying nearly half a tonne of gold from Matalinka.

The gold heist is only the beginning of Hooper’s troubles as Deperne crosses and double crosses his partner, dragging him into a web of murder, kidnapping, rape and corruption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley
• Release date: Dec 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370527519

Lew Deegan

Lew Deegan was born in the tiny West Australian goldfields town of Southern Cross. He discovered his penchant for writing while studying literature and journalism at Curtin University. Today he lives between Cooya Beach in Queensland and Balmoral Beach in Sydney, and like many Australian novelists and artists, is inspired by the Antipodean landscape, its monotony and grandeur and vast emptiness.

Book preview

Chapter One

It was a little after dawn. The sun climbed relentlessly above the arid plain, its shimmering striations effacing the grey pre-dawn pallor. The early morning rays transformed the ochre red earth, stunted mulgas and hummocks of dried spinifex dotted across the endless flat expanse into a mesmerising tapestry of silken strands of gold and red and orange and purple.

In half an hour or so the early morning light and long shadows that added such vivid texture and contrast would succumb to the cauterising heat and blinding white of the full day, revealing the true desolation and harshness of this immutable land.

For the moment, the air was still invitingly fresh after a clear, cold night. The colours changed by the minute in the cloudless sky; tinges of pink and grey suffusing the far horizon melded into white before graduating into the familiar deep azure at its zenith.

Mack and Arko stood all but motionless by the roadside, staring into the desolate void. They did not talk. Mack’s slight shuffling of feet punctuated incessant swats at the tiny black bush flies coagulating in black clumps around his eyes and mouth. The flies were ever present. The sun had been up for over an hour. Mack and Arko had been working in the outback so long as to barely notice them. Some days there were a few more, some a few less, but they were ever present. A casual wave of a hand dislodged all but the most determined of the annoying insects as they gorged voraciously on bodily secretions, setting them to flight for a scant few seconds before they returned to their target to feed once again.

Lean, hard and unkempt, Bob Arkans and Eugene ‘Mack’ MacKenna typified the men of the North. Australia’s cultural diversity was nowhere more evident than in the nor-west. The myriad mines and construction sites were sweated over by a potpourri of Asians, Brits, Eastern Europeans, Yanks, South Africans, South Americans and the occasional Aussie. The balance was a lottery.

Mining and all that went with it was booming throughout the remote regions of the Pilbara, Kimberley, Northern Territory and Cape York, and had been for a decade or more. Iron ore was the big one. The Chinese couldn’t get enough of the shit, but demand and prices for damn nearly every other mineral followed iron’s lead to meteoric heights. Gold, copper, nickel, bauxite, coal . . . you name it, they were all posting record highs. The boom was a bonanza for workers. The mines would take all comers, no questions asked. If you’d work, you’d get a job. Like the French Foreign Legion, they attracted more than their fair share of haunted men with shadowy pasts. They came to hide, to escape, to forget; and they came for the money. A job in the mines would give even the greenest rookie double the money they’d get down south.

Arko surveyed the dry creek bed at his feet. He was dazed and confused. It was as though he couldn’t comprehend what it was that he was looking at. His gut stirred, tight and unfamiliar.

The creek, a long depression that largely followed the meander of the road, its form scarcely defined by scattered tufts of spinifex and low scrub that had miraculously clung to life during the long-forgotten rains that few had ever seen course along its length, was barely discernable from the surrounding country.

The dust began to settle back on the gravel road. The compact SUV picked up in Kununurra the day before lay on its side, battered beyond recognition. It was a car designed to pick kids up from school and ferry them to piano lessons or afternoon sport, not take on rough gravel tracks masquerading as roads. No panel escaped unscathed. The wheels had just stopped spinning, the engine quiet save the ticks from the shrinking metal as the hot engine sought equilibrium with the cooler desert air.

A solitary crow screeched from a perch high in the weeping foliage of a desert she-oak overlooking the wrecked vehicle, its mournful cry cutting a swathe through the relentless drone of myriad unseen insects. It laughed, mocking the men below with its raucous cackle.

Mack felt sick, his eyes struggled to find focus. He coughed a deep wracking cough. A tiny glob of acrid green bile rose in his throat. He spat the disgusting liquid into the dust and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

He reflected momentarily on the tumultuous blur since the SUV started its inexorable slide sideways before hitting the long mound of earth piled to the side of the road by a recent grading. The moment the left front wheel hit the mound, the hapless vehicle’s fate was sealed. It rolled almost instantly, bucking high into the air before careering relentlessly down the embankment at the side of the road, the unyielding steel bullbar gouging huge rents of blood red earth from the bank of the shallow creek that ran along the eastern side of the road, blue sky flashing in subliminal iridescent bursts through the windscreen. It whorled through two bone jarring rolls before coming to a grinding halt on its side in a cloud of dust.

Afraid the fuel tank would blow, Arko and Mack scrambled frantically from the driver’s window moments after they came to a halt. They were shaken but largely unhurt. They’d been travelling at less than seventy ks an hour when they came to grief. Even at such a low speed the rollover was a head spinning freefall with no guarantee of survival.

The shock engulfed MacKenna and Arkans alike. Pulses raced, palms sweated through skin calloused by years of physical toil, and the blood drained from their brains leaving them lightheaded and giddy.

Arko’s head started to clear after a few minutes basking in the morning sun. He looked towards Mack. He was clearly still shaken, but there were no obvious injuries. ‘Bugger me. That was a ride ‘n a half,’ Arko muttered, barely loud enough to be heard.

The words snaked along a narrow path through the fog in Mack’s addled brain. ‘Y’r the world’s shitest driver,’ he responded after a long pause.

‘What’d you expect, a feather bed?’

‘Y’r were goin’ way too fast. We’re bloody lucky to be alive.’

‘Better than the half-arsed job you would have done.’

Mack paused. He wasn’t up to speed as yet. ‘Piss off,’ he growled dismissively, using all his cognitive might to string two words together.

‘You’re a cantankerous bastard.’

‘Go fook yerself.’ The Irishman was arcing up. It was a good sign. They didn’t have time to mope around feeling sorry for themselves.

An insipid little Irishman straight off the boat with a barely decipherable accent, it was hard to imagine why Mack and Arko hit it off, but hit it off they did, most of the time, anyway. Maybe it was just because they’d landed the same job at the same time – two newbies sticking together. In better times they drank, gossiped like old women, told lies and jokes and exaggerated stories of their exploits, sexual and otherwise, but they would also sledge each other mercilessly, throwing insults that belittled, mocked and embarrassed. Mostly it was a game, but every now and then one of them would get the sulks and it’d take a few hours to revert to their normal repartee.

Eugene MacKenna regaled stories of his boxing prowess as a kid at Mulranny National School in the remote County Mayo in Ireland whenever he found a way to work it into the conversation. Clinging to a scrap of land between Clew and Blacksod Bays on the west coast, the town was so small as to be almost non-existent. Achievements of any sort in Mulranny, including his credentials as a pugilist, were of questionable virtue.

‘How good is good in a town barely able to scrape together a football team?’ Arko asked himself, his mind wandering aimlessly.

The puny, white skinned Irishman that got off the plane in Darwin all goggle eyed had manned up since being up north. A nuggety little bastard with stumpy arms that could tuck in close to his body to form an impenetrable wall or lash-out with devastating brutality, Mack was now the guy in the pub you shouldn’t mess with even though he was hitting on your girlfriend.

Arko had never seen him box. Maybe he could, maybe he couldn’t. He was certainly tough. Maybe he made up being a boxer so no one would kick his scrawny Irish arse. Either way, prudence suggested he get in first, and get out fast.

He clenched his hands into rock hard fists and swayed ever so slightly, shifting his weight to his right side, pausing ever so slightly like a shot-putter amassing the power in his muscular torso. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. The cannon was primed. Without warning, his right fist shot upwards in a cavalier hook that caught the unsuspecting Irishman with a glancing blow to the left eye.

It was an ungainly swipe, an ugly roundhouse haymaker, but it got enough contact to double the Irishman over. ‘Ahh, fook,’ he roared, his Irish accent as thick as ever. ‘Fook, fook, fook’, he screamed over and over as he sucked in a lungful of dust-tainted air. He clasped both hands firmly over the eye, applying pressure to the impact zone. The eye swelled and started bruising immediately. The brow bore the brunt of the impact. It glowered red. Tiny droplets of blood oozed to the surface of the grazed skin.

Mack stared at the smear of crimson red blood on his right hand. There wasn’t much of it, but enough to know first blood had been drawn. ‘You fookin’ arse,’ he hissed. ‘It was a king hit, yer prick.’

‘About time you got the thick ear ya deserve,’ Arko retorted. He wasn’t angry, but he wanted to be. He’d need all the adrenaline he could muster to stand a chance against the Irishman.

‘You might ‘av got the first one in, but it’ll be y’r bloody last,’ Mack growled as he shoved Arko backwards with a contemptuous backhand. He dropped his right shoulder low and charged with all his might, catching Arko’s lanky frame below the solar plexus. He reeled backwards, arms flailing uselessly. With his opponent off balance, Mack lined up his attack. A good four to five inches shorter than Arkans, his once slight frame had filled out in the past few years. He was more than a match for the lanky Aussie. The charge was followed by three penetrating right hands. Each punch flew straight and hard, finding its mark precisely.

‘Christ, the bastard was a boxer after all,’ Arko realised in an instant. His knees wobbled. He knew he was in for a hiding if he went toe to toe.

Even with a significant height and reach advantage, he’d be lucky to see out one round.

A trickle of blood seeped from his left nostril.

He had to capitalise on his height and weight advantage, and fast. He lunged forward desperately, acutely aware it was likely to be his last hurrah before copping a hiding. With the Irishman’s head locked firmly under his left arm he fired his two best blows of the stoush squarely into the already damaged left eye. A third did the job. The brow split in a deep gash almost as long as the brow itself. Blood flowed in a steady stream down Eugene MacKenna’s face.

Arko raised his hand in surrender. Gasping for air, he stumbled onto the dusty road, the shock from the rollover had disappeared without trace. ‘You weren’t too pretty to start off with but you’ve taken a serious turn for the worse,’ he laughed.

Mack had lived in Australia for four years, but his Irish accent hadn’t faded in the slightest. He’d gone back to Ireland a year ago to visit his mum and sister. They said he sounded like an Australian. ‘Good on ya mate. ‘Ow’s it goin’, mate?’ they mocked; but in Australia he was as Irish as the day he was born.

‘You ain’t no picture yr-self,’ he slurred, bending over to spit out a mouthful of blood. ‘Yer wouldn’t have made three minutes in a real fight, guaranteed.’

‘You just got one lucky punch in. I was about to put you on your arse.’

‘In your dreams.’

The fun was over.

‘Ow’s the time?’

‘Seven-thirty on the dot.’

Mack looked up. The sun had risen noticeably in the short time they’d been out of the wreck.

Arko walked towards the upturned vehicle, reaching across to the driving mirror that now pointed skywards. It was cracked, but intact. He directed the shattered reflector towards his face to inspect the damage. ‘Christ, I am lookin’ a little ordinary. You pack a mean punch.’

‘You won’t get off so fookin’ lightly next time, let me give you the tip.’

Arko kept his mouth shut. He wasn’t booking a return bout any time soon.

Mack couldn’t hide the fact that he was dirty about coming off second best. Any other time he’d have fought on until he was victorious or so badly beaten he couldn’t throw another punch. He turned away, lowering his still balled fists as he trudged away in search of some space to put between him and the lanky Aussie.

With broad shoulders and a sculpted stone-slab chest more reminiscent of an ancient Greek deity than a bedraggled bogan combing through the scene of a car accident, Arko was the polar opposite of Mack. He was the quintessential Aussie, if there was such a thing. A cheeky larrikin with an infectious grin, his thin lips and narrow nose accentuated dark, mischievous eyes set deep in bony sockets. Unkempt, almost black hair morphed into a scraggly rat-brown beard while his skin glowed an even olive brown more akin to the yuppies that get their tans from a bottle or in a solarium rather than on a work site. With a trim, a good scrub and a pair of bum hugging Speedos, Arko would pass for a surf lifesaver at Bondi.

A Chinese dragon snaked down his right arm from shoulder to fingertips. On the back of his hand read the inscription, ‘Give up all hope’, bordered by a ring of black razor wire dripping blood down his index finger. It brought the faintest of smiles to Arko’s face every time he looked at it. He’d pinched the line from a sign outside an army disposal store in Darwin four days before.

Right now, they were a long way from Bondi and they wouldn’t have dissolved unnoticed into the throng of tourists, surfies and cappuccino sipping up and coming execs and merchant bankers that monopolised the bustling beach promenade.

Even before the rollover and punch-up they looked unkempt, but not so much as to be out of place in most towns up north. A good many of the men in these parts were hard working labourers. It was tough country and tough men were needed to build it, farm it and mine it.

The dust from the rollover had long settled, the familiar smell of eucalyptus and acacia and mulga returned once again.

Mack’s cheeks glowed with the rosiness of the Irish, even through sun-scorched skin. He stood in the dappled shade of the desert she-oak gingerly poking at his bloodied left eye. His eyes downcast, his face expressionless. Even in good times he wasn’t the life of the party. Today he was downright sullen. He barely noticed Arko. He nonchalantly unzipped his khaki shorts and pissed into the creek bed near the upturned vehicle, firing his hot stream into a cavalcade of red bull ants that scurried frantically for cover.

With one hand on the bottom of the driver’s side door, Arko effortlessly catapulted onto the overturned vehicle in a single deft move. He wrestled the heavy door open, shoving it back hard on its hinges. Against the force of gravity, it weighed a tonne. The top hinge succumbed to the assault. The cast metal housing shattered. The door twisted off to one side, but remained attached to the deformed bodywork by the remaining hinge.

He lowered himself into the cabin, squeezing past the steering wheel and gear stick. It looked more akin to the battered dross of a cyclone than a minor road accident. The windscreen was shattered, plastic panels dangled from the dashboard exposing a maze of wires and the felt lining on the roof drooped forlornly having all but come adrift. The roof itself had been flattened several inches lower than before the rollover, and the two airbags that had saved them from serious injury had showered a film of fine white powder over the already considerable havoc.

Arko planted his feet on the inside of the passenger door, still surprised they had managed to walk away from the devastation unscathed. He retrieved two backpacks, shoving them up and out of the gaping doorway. The SUV’s bodywork was already so hot that he could only put his hands on it for a matter of seconds before his flesh started to burn. With the bags stacked side-by-side on the flattened door, he braced himself on the frame and clambered out as fast as he could.

‘Grab these,’ he barked, throwing the bags at Mack before jumping to the ground.

No one loved the dust that was part and parcel of living and working in the North, but Mack hated it more than most. It was his one continual gripe. He could live with the heat, the isolation and even the flies, but not the bloody dust. As fine as talcum, it got into your eyes and your hair and covered your boots and clothes. It permeated every part of every building, every piece of equipment and every vehicle inside and out and wreaked havoc with fuel and electrical systems. A permanent layer even coated the inside of the accommodation demountables no matter how often they were swept and mopped.

‘Got everything?’ Mack asked, clearly champing at the bit to get moving.

‘Yeah, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’

‘Do you want me to do the honours?’

‘I’ll do it.’

The wrecked SUV smelled of diesel. It had seeped from the tank and formed a damp patch in the otherwise tinder-dry dust. Arko scraped a heap of dried grass the size of a shoebox together with his boot and piled it onto the diesel-soaked ground. He looked around nervously, half expecting to see someone watching his every move, then crouched down, lit the match and put it to the dried grass. The flame spread almost instantly. He took a step back to watch the grass burn.

‘That enough, you reckon?’

‘Give it a sec.’

The flame snaked upwards, helped by the diesel fumes, until it found its mark in the undercarriage of the wrecked SUV. The grey smoke from the dried grass gave way to a menacing black cloud tainted with the acrid smell of burning plastic. In less than a minute, flames leaped from the back of the vehicle.

‘Best thing that could ever happen to it, piece of shit that it was.’

‘All done.’ Arko turned his attention to the gravel road that ran off the intersection where they had rolled. ‘There’s no point hanging around here any longer. Let’s hit the road.’

‘It’s bad enough avin’ to drive on this shit, let alone walk on it,’ Mack muttered, staring pensively at the gravel road disappearing uninvitingly into the distance.

Mack could be a grumpy bastard at the best of times. The day hadn’t started well: he’d had bugger all sleep, been in a car crash, lost a punch up, and it wasn’t even breakfast time.

Arko slung his backpack on one shoulder. They walked as dead men. Silently. Relentlessly. Each deep in thought. Everything that needed to be said had been said.

Dappled sunlight penetrated the scattered snappy gums that fringed the road and provided a degree of protection from the rising sun’s full onslaught.

Bob Arkans was thirty-six, fit and muscular and with the single-mindedness that comes from military service. He had a few scrapes with the law as a teenager before his parents convinced him to join the ADF. It surprised them when he took their advice and signed up, not having been one to take any advice of any kind. He did six years, qualified as a diesel mechanic, and joined the 3rd Brigade's Combat Engineer Regiment where he rose from private to lance corporal and eventually to corporal. Deployed to East Timor with the UN peace keeping forces, he successfully led a number of long patrols through some of the most difficult terrain on earth, thriving in the heat and humidity that brought many a man to his knees. He may have stayed in the army for life, but he roughed up a senior sergeant one night in Townsville. While both men were off duty, progress up the ranks was on ice. He opted out.

The walk to Matalinka was infinitely harder than either expected. The temperature soared as the sun began its relentless pursuit of the zenith. It was just on five kilometres to the boundary gate. Half an hour in they were perspiring heavily, dehydrated and nearing exhaustion. Their wounds attracted unprecedented swarms of the tiny bush flies that satiated themselves on irresistible rivulets of blackening blood. The flies refused to be dislodged by the usual wave of a hand. This was fly nirvana and they weren’t about to be moved on by an ineffectual waving hand. They had to literally be scraped en masse or picked individually from the congealing blood.

Both men gave up their futile attempts to dislodge the flies.

The subtle emanations from the ubiquitous eucalypts and acacias combined with the mineral smell of the not long since graded gravel road. MacKenna drew a deep breath, conscious for a fleeting moment of the unique aroma of the Australian bush and how different it was from his verdant homeland. His mind meandered back to the events of the past few weeks, the insane, improbable events that saw him tumbling unfettered into a conflagration that, in all likelihood, would see him jailed for life or as dead as one of the maggot-ridden kangaroos that littered the sides of the road into Matalinka.

Before moving to Australia, he’d been a member of an Irish motorcycle club and had done time on three occasions – four years all up. A few petty charges was all, minor drug shit. The thought that he should get out of Ireland was nourished by the knowledge it was only a matter of time until he copped a sentence that’d put him behind bars for twenty years or more.

A job in the mines put plenty of distance between him and the temptation of drugs and bikers. He hadn’t been involved in so much as a bar room brawl since arriving in Australia.

Now he was back at the front line, up to his neck in shit. As he trudged wearily along the dirt road a few paces behind Arko, he knew they were already beyond the point of no-return.

He thought about the hooker he’d bedded in Darwin the night before leaving. It didn’t make him feel any better even at the time, but he felt he deserved one last root if this thing went to shit as was likely. The girl was nice enough. Great tits, but just doing a job. There was no banter, no emotion, no warmth. Do the business, pay your dough and get the hell out.

He looked up. A subtle change in the otherwise interminable scenery shattered the morning reverie.

Chapter Two

It was early spring, but all the signs suggested it was going to be a hot summer.

Stirling Hooper grew up in Perth. He knew what a hot summer was like. Day after day the mercury leapt past forty degrees and at night it was lucky to drop below thirty. As teenagers, they’d drag their mattresses out and lay them on the concrete driveway to escape the stifling heat pent up inside. The walls in the Hooper family home were brick inside and out, like most in Perth. They’d withstand a direct hit from a hundred kiloton bomb, but once heated up in summer they’d stay as hot as a blacksmith’s forge for weeks on end.

Sleeping out in the open, they’d get the slightest whiff of breeze should any manage to find its way inland from the ocean, twelve kilometres west. During these hot spells, the Fremantle Doctor – the famously regular afternoon sea breeze – would fail to arrive, or, if it did arrive, it came with barely enough puff to extinguish a birthday candle.

It was still early but the day’s heat and glare were building exponentially. The slanting golden rays of the early morning had long given way to the blinding white of day that stabbed at his eyeballs as the sun arched inexorably to its peak, burning off the morning dew on its upward journey. The dew made the crops in the farms he’d whistled past shimmer with shards of silver and gold through the wisps of mist that clung tenaciously to the rolling paddocks. He was cocooned inside the cab, but the heat radiated through the windows, biting at the leathery skin on his right forearm and forcing his eyes to squint through the polarised Ray Ban’s perched high on the bridge of his nose.

His arms bore the hallmarks of too much time in the sun. The skin was deeply tanned, but dry and weathered well beyond a man of thirty-seven years. Little white sunspots peppered his tanned hide. Every now and then he would rub his arm to disperse the accumulating heat of the sun, but end up scratching the dry, flaky skin from one of the numerous benign sunspots. No matter how many he scratched, there were always more.

The air conditioning cooled the cab’s interior, but the gentle breeze flowing up from the windscreen exacerbated his already pained eyes. He pulled his sunglasses forward to the tip of his nose and glanced briefly at the blood red eyeballs staring back from the rear view mirror. His eyes were glassy, whites streaked with livid red capillaries and bright red splotches that growled from the inner corners, and his face had the ashen grey pallor of a cadaver.

He couldn’t help but laugh at what he saw. ‘God, you’re a fucking mess,’ he curses his reflection. He’d aged dramatically, seemingly overnight.

He wound the window down letting in a blast of hot air then poked his right arm out into the full force of the gale. The power of it took him by surprise. It felt like it’d wrench his arm off at the elbow if he relaxed. He braced his arm against the back edge of the door then twisted and turned his hand in the hundred and twenty k an hour breeze so it ducked and weaved like a wind vane tossed every which way in a storm. It sparked him up for the briefest of moments. Window up, scan the airwaves for a radio station with less crackle, window down, check the rear view mirror, window up again . . . anything to break the monotony, anything to fight off sleep.

He was on the road long before dawn having had a brief kip on the side of the road the previous night. He didn’t notice the time. It didn’t matter. He’d drive while he could, sleep if he absolutely must.

It’d been a hell of a drive, nearly five thousand kilometres in three days. He’d made good time considering and was glad to be out of the nor-west. The country that once defined him held nothing for him. It had betrayed him, cut him to the bone and left him suppurating in the outback sun. The once mesmerizing colours, long open plains and spectacular rugged ranges were now nothing more than a barren wasteland, a harsh and unforgiving hell-hole where even birds and kangaroos struggled to survive.

He’d had a quick stop for fuel and a takeaway coffee three hours earlier. Even with the early start, he was running late for the eleven a.m. appointment in the city.

Exhaustion fogged his mind and his butt ached painfully from interminable hours wedged behind the wheel. He put his weight on one cheek of his behind until the ache became unbearable, then swapped to the other side, or slumped well forward so he barely peered over the steering wheel. There was no time to stop and stretch his legs.

Despite his physical woes, he felt better than he had in ages. There was hope. It was just a glimmer, but hope all the same.

Despite the hope, in the back of his mind he feared the worst.

Stirling Hooper’s parents were boozers. He’d never forget their continual bickering and fighting, the alcohol fuelled violence that would have him hide under the bed or get out of the house until things quietened down, which they invariably did. As he grew up, he refused to let his childhood define him, refused to become the victim, but every time things started looking up, something would happen that would kick him in the arse. He’d convinced himself he had a unique capacity to snatch defeat from the jaws of success.

Now it was happening again.

He was fucked up, washed up and flat broke.

His old man had criticised Stirling Hooper’s every less than perfect performance, every failure and every youthful indiscretion.

Whether it was missing selection in football teams, not getting the expected grades at the School of Mines, girls giving him the flick just as he was about to make first base or the marriage that crumbled in a heap taking his daughter away from him, he seemed destined for failure.

With Aventier gone, he had time to think. Too much time. It was a dance with the devil. He was convinced afresh that he was being singled out by life, that he had an errant flaw, a delinquent gene that laid in wait ready to pounce.

Shit happens to everyone, but he could only see his own.

Alone at Aventier, he sat on the steps of the donga facing the main office, staring at the deserted grey buildings rising from the red dust that had been whipped into a frenzy by a willy-willy that rose out of nothing from the gravel road at his feet.

Aventier was as he’d left it. The doors were unlocked. Nothing had been disturbed. It was as if the people had been plucked off the face of the earth without trace by aliens.

He wandered through the deserted buildings, stopping to reacquaint himself with the sight and smell of each and every one. Inside, they smelled musky. Not having had a whiff of ventilation for months, the air was fetid and stiflingly hot. In his room, the bed was still unmade, a faint yellow patina visible on the sheets from his frequent night time sweats. Abandoned clothes lay scattered on the floor. He’d packed only the barest of essentials before his hasty departure.

Without the daily imperative of work, the people and the endless banter of the miners, the buildings were worthless, empty shells. Cold, grey and lifeless.

Outside, his mind sifted through fading memories of early childhood visits, the good times, the tough times, the hard work and long hours, his father that he could picture still with a permanent frown etched on his face and a hand rolled cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, the many men and occasional woman that had come and gone, their bank accounts bulging from a year or two down the mines. For many, it was a brief stint in their lives, a year or two, four or five at the most. Few made a life-long career working in the hostile conditions thousands of kilometres from family, friends and civilisation.

Stirling Hooper was one of the exceptions. The fickleness of birth right had made it his life and his home. He hadn’t left voluntarily. He’d been wrenched away, kicking and screaming, a shattered man, his pride in tatters and his livelihood ground ruthlessly into the ephemeral red dust swirling across the vast Kimberley plain.

By the time he drove the few minutes from the camp to the mine it was late afternoon. The sun rolled over the little hill outside camp like golden molasses poured from a giant cauldron. By rights, he should have been on the road back to Perth already. He knew he was staying longer than he should, but didn’t regret a moment of it. He’d make up time on the lonely outback roads.

He sat amongst the deserted pre-fab buildings, reflecting on all that had happened, sifting through the memories of a lifetime. The people: good, bad, funny and sad. The hard-workers and the no-hopers. Each burned indelibly into his mind.

But no matter how deep the reverie, his mind snapped back to the harsh reality of the present all too soon.

For months he’d been overwhelmed by the search for a saviour, an angel investor or venture capitalist that would save the mine.

Hooper held himself together for a few weeks after the mine closed, but went downhill fast as the little bit of money he had in reserve started to run out. The handful of blokes he thought of as mates telephoned a few times at first, but as the weeks became months, the calls dried up. He hit the bottle hard. Drinking himself into oblivion was the only way he could get any sleep. As his mates gave him up, some of their wives got together to help, bringing around food and insisting on cleaning up.

For several weeks, Deidre Castanadas made it her mission in life to tend to Hooper, but it turned out she had almost as many problems as he did. He woke up beside her naked body late one afternoon after they drank two bottles of wine to wash down the lunch she brought over. It put an end to the sisters of mercy missions.

Many a time he wished his life would just end, but ending it himself was not something he could contemplate. He neither valued life too much nor was particularly afraid of death, but just as he couldn’t fly by flapping his arms, he couldn’t take his own life or even get close to that black abyss. He was programmed to endure.

After so many dark days, he’d all but forgotten how much Aventier meant to him. It was his life as well as his work. Even though he fucked it up, it was all he knew.

The inspection of the mine took only minutes. There was nothing to see, nothing had changed one iota, but Deperne insisted he take the long journey from Perth to make a fresh assessment.

‘Job done,’ he said out loud as the camp disappeared in the rear view mirror. ‘I hope we meet again soon.’

‘Move shithead,’ he bellowed at the car in front as he focused his attention back on the road ahead. He caught glimpses of the back of the man’s head as the car crawled around the lonely kinks in an otherwise straight road. ‘Dithering old bastard!’ he yelled.

Stirling Hooper’s frustration rose. He could stand the eighty ks no longer. He pulled the clunky gearbox back to third and soldered his foot to the floor. The cumbersome four-wheel-drive careered out across the double white lines. With the engine screaming to its limit, he leant his full weight on the horn. The Landcruiser lurched back into the left lane, barely clearing the front bumper of the overtaken car. As he pulled in, he saw the headlights flashing repeatedly in the rear view mirror. He instinctively gave the bird as he powered away.

Foot to the floor, he gathered speed once again, settling just under one-ten. It was fast enough to chew up some of the many needed ks, but not so fast as to get arrested should he get pulled over by the ubiquitous road patrols. Besides, the last thing he could afford right now was a speeding fine.

No sooner had he got past one car than he caught another, then another and another. He didn’t mind, if the truth be known. He enjoyed the cut and thrust of driving fast. Hard on the brakes, back on the accelerator, cornering as fast as the old tank could manage. He’d rather do it in a more nimble vehicle, but the ‘Cruiser was de rigueur in the north-west.

Hooper’s Landcruiser wasn’t de rigueur in these parts or any other parts for that matter. A ’78 short wheelbase, the previous owner had it tricked up with all the bells and whistles: heavy duty gas shocks, winch, racing seats, disc brakes and a V8 engine to replace the gutless 3.4 litre straight six fitted as standard. It was in mint condition when he bought it, but condemned to Aventier’s corrugated roads and a life of abuse and neglect, it had quickly shown its age. It had been bought as a hack to run between camp and the mine. By rights, it should have gone with Aventier, but Hooper managed to keep it out of the hands of the liquidators as it was in Perth when the mine closed. It was too worthless for the faceless assassins to bother about.

He pulled back into the left lane, having overtaken another dawdling driver.

His adrenaline was pumping as much from the drive as it was from being late for his meeting. He knew that being late wasn’t likely to be well received by Karl Deperne.

‘Obviously your time is much more valuable than mine,’ the swarthy Argentinian hissed sarcastically when his finance director, Paul McCann, was a few minutes late for their last meeting. ‘We’ll wait for a time that is convenient to you. Perhaps your secretary can book me in a few minutes of your valuable time. Or perhaps my guest and I should just chat amongst ourselves, talk about the weather and other such vitally important topics while we await your presence . . .’ on and on he ranted.

‘Sorry I kept you waiting. Feras Aboud called regarding the new contract as I was walking out the door.’ The numbers man grovelled to no avail. Nothing would stop the tirade once it began. Paul McCann was accustomed to being on the receiving end of Deperne’s invective. He didn’t bother mounting a defence of any substance after the initial explanation and apology.

‘I’m president of this goddamn company, but that’s obviously of little concern to you.’ Deperne pushed the verbal assault up a notch. The feigned innuendo and subtle sarcasm evaporated.

Hooper stopped listening after five minutes, but the display wasn’t lost on him. It set the ground rules. He’d known little of Deperne before he’d met him. It was rumoured that he killed his first wife, or at least had her killed. She washed up on a Sydney beach wrapped in black plastic bound with gaffa tape a few years back. Whatever once held her down had come adrift, so she bobbed to the surface and rode the currents to shore just south of Whale Beach on the northern peninsula.

Whether Deperne killed her or not was neither here nor there. It established his reputation as an underworld lord that’d have you kneecapped if you got him offside. People who knew him well said he never denied the allegations. Equally, he never admitted they were true. He was smart enough to tell no one, aware many a man had ended up behind bars from a confession made over a beer.

Hooper had met Karl Deperne only three days earlier. It’d been three and a half months since he walked away from Aventier, his dreams shattered. The mine had never been the greatest money-spinner, but it had done okay.

The Hoopers never had the business acumen of some of the others who’d profited well from the mining boom. They didn’t know jack about capital raisings, leveraging, going public and all the stuff that had turned so many tenement owners into multi-millionaires and multi-millionaires into multi-billionaires.

But still, they’d done okay. They’d had a good living, paid their staff well and had the odd holiday. There were a few great years and a few not so good, such was the mining business.

Then it rained. ‘Oh Christ did it rain,’ he thought to himself. In four days the red earth became a quagmire. The normally dusty, parched sand became a glutinous brown sludge that bogged anyone intrepid or stupid enough to attempt to drive on it. If, by some miracle, you didn’t get bogged, you’d turn the road into a labyrinth of tortuous furrows, making it undriveable until they got a grader to it in a few months’ time.

The roads in and out of the mine were public, but you’d perish waiting for the Main Roads Department to send its grader, so Aventier had to divert their own men and machines to keep the road serviceable. Even without rain, the road deteriorated rapidly between grades. Twice a year was the minimum needed to prevent shaking man and machine to pieces.

If you were a farmer you were as happy as a pig in shit with the rain, he thought. The cattle’d get a good drink, the water would soon subside and the grass would grow. You might lose the odd cow or sheep, but who gives a damn about a sheep. ‘What’s a bloody sheep worth?’ he thought out loud. ‘Fifty bucks, maybe a hundred?’

Stirling Hooper wasn’t a farmer, he was a miner, a gold miner that drove shafts deep underground, following the fickle vein of gold that meandered through the quartz wall well below the dusty surface. You’d think you had it, then it’d peter out. A few specks here and there, then you’d dig and dig to get back on the gold.

They’d just hit one of the richest patches of gold they’d seen in years. The assay had indicated ten grams to the tonne, which was a damn sight better than last year’s average of just over one and a half grams.

Three or four months at ten grams or even a healthy fraction of ten grams would pay the bills for a year, and then some. But they didn’t get three or four months. They didn’t get three or four weeks. No sooner had the assay come in than the rain came down. Eight days. That’s all they got. Eight lousy days.

Hooper made a point of doing an underground walkthrough every day. He loved the eternal night, the roar of the drill and the crack and percussive thunder of the blasts that rolled through the drives and up the shaft. Mining was in his veins. He’d worked this mine since he was a kid.

His parents separated when he was eleven after a lifetime of arguments, chronic discontent and domestic violence. Stirling’s father had never spent much time at home, often going away to the mine for several months at a time.

All Stirling remembered of their marriage was the arguments that oscillated between endemic annoyance and malevolent screaming matches. Mostly they weren’t physical, but every now and then things got ugly – especially when they were both on the turps.

Tom was an alcoholic, a womaniser and an occasional wife basher. He’d been Perth’s fitness champion in his youth. If he hit you, you stayed hit.

Rae started out as a very occasional drinker, but the loneliness, bickering and violence pushed her to the bottle. She’d always had a sharp tongue and a volatile temperament, and took pride in giving as good as she got in any argument with Tom, even if it only served to fuel the fire.

With such long absences, many an argument would start with Rae wanting to talk when he got home from the mine, even about little things, everyday issues like bills and Stirling’s school, or her friends and family.

Stirling remembered one night towards the end of their marriage. It was nearly eight p.m. when Tom got home from the Weld Hotel. He’d been up north for just short of six weeks. Rae suspected he wouldn’t be home for dinner as usual, so she and Stirling ate early. She dutifully served his dinner when he staggered in and opened another bottle of red. They both had more than a few drinks under their belts already.

‘Did you pay the rates? I got another call from the council today saying they’re overdue,’ Rae asked innocently.

‘Give me some peace, will ya? I’ve just got home.’

‘You’re never home. When can I talk to you about anything? If I try to talk to you on the phone, you say wait ‘til I get home, but when you’re home you don’t want to talk about anything. You just sit in the corner brooding and drinking, stuck in your own world deep inside that thick head of yours.’

‘You should talk about drink. Seems to be the one thing you’re good at.’

‘If I drink, it’s only because you drive me to it.’

Her retort lit a fuse in the old man. The kitchen and its dining table opened into the lounge room with the television. The chair Tom had been sitting on went flying backwards clattering on the kitchen floor as he stood up. He turned to Stirling, his fists clenched. ‘Get to bed,’ he roared.

‘Huh?’

‘’Is there something wrong with your hearing? I said get to bed, and I mean now.’

Stirling ran. He’d felt the old man’s heavy hand too often to consider disobeying. He also knew his mum was likely as not in for another black eye.

‘Leave him out of this. He can hear your abuse just as clearly from his bedroom as he can from the lounge room. The whole neighbourhood can hear.’

Rae turned to her son. ‘Go, quickly. Lock the door.’ She’d seen that look in Tom Hooper’s eyes before. No one was safe, not even Stirling, and particularly not her.

Stirling paused a second too long. Tom Hooper covered the few steps across the room in a split second, lifted him off the ground by the collar and threw him against the far wall in the adjacent hallway.

‘Come back out and I’ll knock your block off,’ he screamed. Stirling leaped to his feet and scrambled into his bedroom, slamming the door shut just as Rae launched an ineffectual attack on her husband.

Stirling didn’t see what happened, but he heard the all too familiar sickening dull thud like a football hitting a wall and the ensuing sobs from his mother. Rae was on a hiding to nothing in a punch up with the old man. She went for the cutlery drawer. Armed with a bread and butter knife, she lunged at him with her full weight. The booze had dulled his reflexes, the knife found its mark just below the heart. It would leave a livid red mark, but was a long way short of drawing blood.

Tom struck back instantly. His punches were hard and fast. Rae didn’t stand a chance. She slumped to the floor, blood trickling from one nostril and oozing from a badly split lip. The bruising would take some time to reveal its full fury. She tried to get to her feet, determined to fight to on. Tom pushed her down. Fists poised to strike yet again, he stood over his prostrate wife, his shirt torn, his muscles pumped and bursting with rage. ‘Get up you bitch, I’m gonna kill you,’ he roared.

This was the fight of all fights. Stirling was convinced his old man would carry through on his death threat. He couldn’t go back to the kitchen, there was no point trying to get between them. Terrified, he jumped out of his bedroom window and ran towards the front of the house with tears flowing freely down his cheeks to get help from Mrs Simpson next door. He scooted along the side fence as he had done a thousand times before – it was his private entry. Mrs Simpson was in the front yard with half a dozen other neighbours.

‘He’s gonna kill her,’ he stammered through the sobs and tears.

Mrs Simpson grabbed him and held him to her bosom. ‘Don’t you worry, my darling. We’ve called the police. Mum will be all right. She’s tough.’

Three of the men nervously climbed the veranda.

‘Tom, Tom,’ yelled Mr. Hartigos, the sallow-faced neighbour from across the road. He was an unlikely hero, but the numbers were in his favour. ‘We’re comin’ in.’

‘Fuck off ya do goodin’ bastard. I’ll do ya like a dinner.’

The trio looked at each