Milkshake (21 page)

The quicker they get this bloody bio-fuel on stream, the
better
, he thought stopping the freezing
torrent and putting the same clothes back on, still warm from
wearing them for the past forty-eight hours. He walked into the
back room to collect his bag to find all the beds already folded
away. The main room at the front looked as if they had never been
there.

Ed was standing in the doorway. “Ready then?”

They walked out into mild mid-morning sunshine. The cottage
was set in a large clearing amongst pine trees. In any other
situation it would have been almost fairytale-like, except for the
stripped dead car bodies piled three-high at the rear of the
property which itself seemed to have fallen into greater disrepair
the further back it went. A corrugated iron lean-to at the rear had
leant a bit too far and collapsed in an untidy uninhabitable mess
of metal, wood and broken glass in rotting frames.

Last night Ed had said they were heading to Nelson. This was
the city David and Katherine had planned to live and work in. It
was where all their belongings now sat in a container awaiting
collection. David knew exactly what was in the container. Nelson
gave him the ideal opportunity to escape.

They were back on a main highway. Other cars, trucks and
several tourist buses passed in the opposite direction. For
everyone else on the road, it was a perfectly normal Thursday
morning. David was on an unfamiliar road in a foreign country,
surrounded by terrorists, heading towards a town called Nelson
which, according to the green road sign, was eighty kilometres
away, and very soon he was expected to help them kill a
politician.

Was Patrick O’Sullivan an innocent man? He wasn’t sure any
more. Ed had certainly tried to persuade him otherwise, but why
should he believe an old school friend who was making this whole
thing out to be some kind of secretive civil war?

David pondered on the fact he had grown up in a time when his
own country had regularly been targeted by terrorists, yet he had
never felt threatened or endangered by them. He was not a target -
neither a soldier, nor a policeman, nor a politician - just a
schoolboy growing up in an age when the only precaution he had to
take was not to go shopping in Central London around Christmas. He
smiled to himself, remembering the warnings to never go on holiday
to Ireland because of the bloody murdering IRA, and yet now
recalling that their most spectacularly horrific bombing had
actually occurred less than eighty miles from where he had grown up
- London, a city he had regularly visited throughout his childhood
when the IRA were most active with their bombing
campaigns.

The Hilux slowed to a crawl. Despite a four litre engine, it
struggled with over a tonne of its own body weight, plus five fully
grown adults, as it hauled itself up the steep mountain road. When
it could barely move any further, with black smoke belching from
its exhaust and all five occupants unconsciously leaning forward as
if it would somehow help, it reached the summit.

What followed was ten minutes of the most frightening driving
David had ever been subjected to - a steep, downhill, switchback
rollercoaster, stomach-churning descent. To the right, a steady
stream of slow moving uphill traffic and, to the left, a sheer
drop, with no safety barrier, into a thickly forested
ravine.

The truck rolled violently at every turn, the combined mass of
bodies forcing it to sway from side to side on its chassis. Hone
seemed to be deliberately braking late on the sharp downhill left
handers, then allowing the heavy truck to coast dangerously fast,
its excessive weight assisting the rapid downwards momentum. As
they descended, the smell of heated rubber increased to the point
where they had to wind down the windows to release the pungent
fumes.

Finally they reached the base of the mountain and all four
passengers visibly relaxed, looking at each other with barely
disguised relief, thankful to have survived a terrifying few
minutes. As the road levelled and straightened, Hone did not let
up. Exhilarated by his successful descent, he pushed his foot
harder to the floor, increasing the speed of the truck until Ed
finally gave in and shouted at him to slow down.

David knew all too well the consequences of Hone’s driving
ability.

Chapter 13

Steep forested hillsides gave way to fields, before houses
began to dot the landscape. David had started to think the South
Island was just a vast landscape of verdant bush and tree covered
mountains. Finally here was a proper town, with buildings higher
than two storeys and what looked like some kind of civic clock
tower.

This was Nelson; the town they intended moving to. Somewhere
in the port, the container with all their possessions was safely
stored. It felt wrong to be seeing it like this, as a hostage in a
truck full of terrorists. This was not the first impression of a
new home anyone should have to experience.

“We’ll go straight to the house,” directed Ed

Hone turned at a roundabout and headed away from the City
Centre. David looked back over his shoulder above the buildings.
Between them and the sky was an expanse of yet more vibrant green
tones. Nelson was bordered by the same mountainous green forests he
had been seeing all morning, bearing down on the city like
tremendous freeze dried tidal waves.

The air clarity sharpened the contrast between the bright
green hills and the pristine blue midday sky. It reminded him of
seeing colour TV as a small child, and turning up the colour to
maximum. It was as if the over the top of the South Island colour
had been turned from ‘natural’ to ‘extreme’.

David recalled the long winter evenings spent planning once
they had been offered work. He and Katherine both thought Nelson
looked a little isolated on the maps, although it had the amenities
and infrastructure they needed to maintain a comfortable
lifestyle.

Now he was actually here, he could see a map couldn’t possibly
convey the vast impenetrable undulating wilderness that lay just
beyond the boundaries of the city and continued all the way to
Christchurch, over four hundred kilometres further south. A million
people on an island the size of England. Now he was beginning to
get a sense of what that actually looked like.

The road curved between the sea and an outcrop of sandstone
cliffs. Expensive-looking houses perched precariously close to the
edge high above. Tasman Bay curved into the distance before
appearing again on the western horizon opposite.

On the other side of the bay, snow-capped mountains, jagged
blue silhouettes rising from the sea, headed south, forming the
skeletal-white backbone of the island. David could see why people
risked building million dollar houses in such an earthquake-prone
area, for the pleasure of waking up to a view like that each
morning. The sunsets must be spectacular;

“Before we get to the house, we need you to see something.”
Ed nodded to Hone, who turned the Hilux sharply up the steep
curving narrow road cut into the sandstone cliff. Again the Ute
twisted and turned, climbing higher with each sharp bend, before
emerging in a small car park built as a lookout at the very top of
the cliff, facing the sea.

At the wooden rail on the cliff’s edge. Hone pointed out the
Boulder Bank; a thin ribbon of shingle beach that acted as a
natural barrier protecting the inner harbour from the open sea
beyond. Between the end of the Bank and a small tree-lined Island
was a breach in the shingle through which the open sea spilled in
from Tasman Bay.

Below them, the rocky shoreline gave way to an expanse of
clean yellow sand that stretched for miles into the distance before
blurring into yet more trees. A backdrop of increasingly misty
hills blurred into the snow-covered mountains crowning the
vista.

David always enjoyed sea views. He found it hard to comprehend
this fabulous sea and mountain panorama was completely devoid of
any obvious commercial encroachment - no hotels, no holiday villas,
not a single cruise ship, or indeed any ship, in the bay. The scene
reminded him of the Mediterranean, but apart from the road below,
and the crane in the port, the only indications of human activity
were faint wisps of smoke from agricultural bonfires on the far
side of the bay.

“Stunning, isn’t it?” commented Ed. “Still takes my breath
away every time I stand up here, and you know what? Come back in an
hour and it’ll look completely different. The tide will have turned
and the sun will have moved, changing the whole perspective of
those mountains. It’s literally a different view every time you
look. This is what we are trying to protect, Hone, show him
why.”

Hone stepped forward, pulling a pair of binoculars from a
small brown case and handing them to David. “Ed’s right, Bro’. Take
a look over there,” he said, pointing south along the coast to
where the bay began to curve away into the distance; “See that big
plume of smoke? Take a closer look.”

David scanned the shoreline. He saw half a dozen smoke trails
that rose before heading north, driven by the constant southerly
breeze.

But whereas the others appeared to rise from inland and had
the distinct blue tinge of wood smoke, the one that Hone was
directing his gaze to, he could tell, even with the naked eye, was
different. Not one trail, but three, and not blue, but white, more
like steam than smoke. He put the binoculars to his face and
focused on the source of these plumes.

Large steel chimneys surrounded by metal buildings rose from
the shoreline amidst this otherwise unspoilt picture of perfect
clean green spectacular scenery. What was this bloody great
industrial blot doing right in the middle of this pristine
landscape? He lowered the binoculars to see the others staring,
waiting for his reaction;

“How the hell did they allow something like that in a place
like this?”

“It was originally built about twenty years ago. It’s been
gradually added to over the years as demand has increased. It’s
used for producing medium density fibre board - MDF. They mince up
wood pulp, compress it into sheets and ship it all over the world
for making cheap furniture, or for building. Apart from being a
huge eyesore, the factory itself is not really a problem - the
current operators have done a lot to keep the environmentalists
sweet - but we’re more worried about the long term plans for the
plant. The building’s already there, so no debate about that. No
need to apply for planning consent. No environmental impact reviews
required. The machinery takes in huge quantities of low grade pine
and spits out the finished MDF. So the basic infrastructure is in
place. Switching production to bio-fuel can be done at a relatively
low cost. When the time is right, Cowood will make a few fairly
inexpensive modifications to the equipment and, within a few months
the plant will re-open and start pumping fuel processed from the
wood pulp through feeder pipes out across the bay, joining up with
the other pipes coming from the other plants along the coast.
Cowood’s dream of making New Zealand the world’s primary source of
bio-fuel is another step closer. We reckon they’ll need to build
another six or maybe seven similar size processing plants around
this bay alone to make it a viable proposition. The pipes running
out along the seabed will need to be vented, so there’ll be dozens
of stacks rising up into the air, climbing about twenty metres. A
constant plume of vapour will either drift back towards the city or
out into the bay. These stacks will have to be floodlit as a
warning to shipping and fishing boats, and they’ll probably have
some kind of security cordon round them. Imagine that factory times
seven; with vertical and horizontal pipe work criss-crossing the
ocean floor and most of the surface of the bay lit up like a
Christmas tree, out of bounds to leisure craft, commercial and
sport fishing. No more kayaking from the National Park on the other
side of the bay. Multiply the combined effect of that by fifty
similar sites around the country. That’s just trees. Don’t forget
the ethanol production from milk you already know about. That’s
what we face.”

David looked out into the bay, trying to visualize all that Ed
had described pasted onto the scene of natural perfection before
him. It was all so obviously wrong in such a stunning location. But
David was still not convinced it was inevitable, or that it was
worth killing in order to stop.

They drove back down. Five minutes later they had pulled into
a quiet side street, onto the drive of a badly maintained
weatherboard house. Getting out of the truck, David looked along
the street. Each house was distinct and different from its
neighbour. All except this one appeared freshly painted, with a
neat well-kept garden.

David looked across the badly cracked drive, the swathe of
green in front of the house a mass of healthy weeds, not grass. The
windows were opaque with dirt, wooden frames cracked and rotting.
It looked as if bed sheets were being used in place of curtains.
The tin roof was dented, rusting and blackened with soot, or
possibly mould. As safe houses went, it didn’t look very safe, at
least from the outside.

Inside was no better. Stepping into the gloom of the hallway,
there was an overwhelming smell of damp mingling with decaying
food. There were three bedrooms, each with two rough looking beds
covered by dirty bed linen, and a lounge area with two ancient
armchairs and a flattened ochre carpet that couldn’t even be
bothered to reach the edges of the room and, in stretching to do
so, had managed to tear a number of ragged holes into the fabric
through which bare wooden boards could clearly be seen.