Nurse had come along at the right time for Lovell. A contact in the Drug Squad had tipped him the wink that the regular courier for the Tradewinds drop was going to be deported to New Zealand on a murder charge. Lovell had asked Bone to come up with someone else, and Bone had given him Nurse, ripe for manipulation. Lovell left Nurses office, well pleased, and drove to the airport.
Three hours and one connecting flight later, Lovell was looking down on Cooktown. It gave him a sense of bitter satisfaction to take a commercial flight. Hed been a second officer with Ansett at the time of the pilots strike in 1989. The company had refused to reinstate him, and he lost his house and marriage, and finished up relief driving for a Q-Cabs owner. Then one night hed got talking with a man called Bone, a radio job to Spring Hill. A week later he was flying again and making three times his old Ansett salary.
A smooth touchdown. Outside on the tarmac conditions were clear, some humidity, a slight north-easterly blowing. He walked to the terminal, made a phone call, and rented a Budget Commodore. He drove to an airstrip north of Cooktown. It dated from the Japanese scare of the Second World War and there were airstrips like it all through the north. They had their uses.
The plane was a Beechcraft Baron with twin 260hp Continental engines. There was room for four people but Lovell rarely carried any passengers. Extra fuel tanks had been fitted and two of the seats removed. Now the Baron had the capacity to carry almost four hundred kilos of cargo a distance of 2500 kilometres, cruising at 10 000 metres at a long-range cruising speed of 370 kilometres per hour. Sometimes, depending on where in Papua New Guinea he was working the trade, he had to refuel enroute. Bones people had arranged fuel dumps at two airfields close to the tip of Cape York Peninsula and a further one on Saibai Island in Torres Strait.
Felix was waiting for Lovell outside the hangar. Hed rolled a joint and was smoking it, a solid, slow-moving, lazy-lidded Melanesian whose forefathers had been dragged to Queensland by blackbirders. Felix got paid in cash and some of the New Guinea Gold that Lovell flew in.
Put it out, Felix.
First one of the day. Im one cool kanaka.
Put the fucking thing out. I want to die in my bed, not blow up on the ground or run out of fuel halfway across the Strait.
Felix shrugged. Youre the boss. He nipped the burning end and put the joint in his shirt pocket.
Lovell looked out across the pocked and empty field to the scrubland beyond. He hated it. Lets roll.
They filled from a 10 000-litre underground fuel tank fitted with an electric pump and a 100-metre retractable hose. The Baron always needed a boost when starting from cold. Felix kept a battery cart at his house, the batteries permanently on a trickle charge. Both men lifted the cart down from the tray of Felixs rusty Hilux and dragged it across to the plane.
By 1500 hours that Friday, Lovell was ready for takeoff. He waved at Felix, who had the joint in his mouth again, and taxied to the end of the strip. Conditions were still clear, the north-easterly moderating a little. Lovell released the brakes, pushed hard down the strip, felt the Baron lift off the ground. He felt good. Levelling off at 10 000 metres, he fixed the course hed follow until he reached the Highlands.
Some time later he crossed the coast at the north-western tip of the Cape. Seven thousand kilometres of coastline from Cairns to Port Hedland, and in Lovells particular corner of it there was fuck-all law to worry about. Queensland and Federal police on Thursday Island, and a minimal customs presence on Thursday and Horn Islands. The poor bastards spent all their time chasing Islanders, who transported the odd gram or two in banana boats and aluminium dinghies, while the big hauls flew in unmolested.
He switched to automatic pilot. This was his fourteenth trip this year. It wasnt always New Guinea Gold. Twice now hed flown in two hundred and thirty kilos of buddha sticks from Thailand worth three hundred thousand bucks a time. Hed also hauled cocaine and heroin that had originated in the Golden Triangle. It made its way overland and then by fishing boat and steamer to PNG, and he transported it the rest of the way. Finally, couriers like Danny took it to the Gold Coast, Sydney, Melbourne, and Lovell funnelled the money back to Mr Bone.
But flavour of the month right now was the PNG cannabis. Last week the radio claimed twenty-three thousand kids in Queensland alone smoked it on a daily basis, eighty thousand on a weekly basis. Users in Sydney couldnt get enough of the stuff and were prepared to fork out two hundred bucks a gram for it.
Meanwhile the demand for heroin and cocaine was undiminished, and skyrocketing for crack. The problem there was that the legal penalties were a lot stiffer. That had given Lovell his great idea. Now when he flew in PNG cannabis, compressed in bales the size of a couple of house bricks, there was cocaine or heroin inside each bale. If the Feds nabbed him, the charge would be conspiring to import cannabis, not cocaine or heroin. The cannabis bales would be incinerated and the hard stuff would go up with it.
Far beneath him a fishing trawler was working. Then again, maybe it was carting drums of compressed cannabis across the Strait to the mainland. Everyone was doing it. Lovell adjusted direction two degrees east. That would put him on course for Goroka and touchdown sometime late in the afternoon. He wondered how Nurse was going.