Marauder (Oregon Files 15)

She described it for him, and they fiddled with it until it was an exact match for the AB logo as she remembered it. The recognition of it sent a shiver down her spine.

“I’ll send it to you so you can do a reverse logo search,” Kevin said to Eric.

While he was doing that, they moved on to the two Aussies she’d seen, detailing their features, which Kevin plugged into his app. Within thirty minutes, she was looking at an eerie facsimile of the faces of the man and woman who had hurt her brother and killed the crew.

“That’s them,” she said.

“We can try a facial match with the CIA’s database,” Kevin said. “If my drawings are close enough and they’re in the system, they should pop up.”

“The logo has popped up,” Eric said, looking at his phone. “At least, I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities.”

He showed them to Sylvia. They were all similar, but her eye was immediately drawn to the image in the center.

“It’s that one.”

“Alloy Bauxite is the name of the company,” Eric said. “According to their corporate filings, they process aluminum.”

“What could that possibly have to do with an attack on the Namaka and Empiric?” Sylvia wondered.

“I don’t know. But if we want to find out, we don’t have to go too far. All their operations are based in one small town in the Northern Territory. It’s called Nhulunbuy. We can be there by tomorrow morning.”

TWENTY-FOUR

PORT COOK, AUSTRALIA

After a hot afternoon spent replacing a burned-out transformer on a utility pole, electrician Paul Wheatley was looking forward to tossing back a cold beer at his favorite pub. The only problem was that his loony workmate would probably join him.

“Mate, I’m telling you,” Harry Knoll said from the passenger seat of their maintenance truck. “They have aliens in there.”

“You’re daft.”

“Then why would they build this place out in woop-woop?”

Wheatley rolled his eyes. He’d had this conversation a hundred times with Knoll. The transformer they’d fixed had been near Royal Australian Air Force Base Talbot, which was located in the far north of Queensland and was the service’s newest “bare base.” Situated on the west coast of the Cape York Peninsula, it was used in earnest only a few times a year by training squadrons headquartered at other bases. The rest of the time, Talbot had a skeleton staff of four and served as a backup base in case someone tried to invade Australia, which Wheatley thought was about as likely as Knoll suddenly abandoning his paranoid delusions.

“Last ye

ar, they had trucks going in and out from the docks,” Knoll rambled on when Wheatley didn’t answer him, “and planes were coming and going. We never saw what was in them, did we?”

“They told us what was happening,” Wheatley said. “They temporarily used the base as an immigrant detention center. They’ve built several of them.”

“That’s what the government wanted us to think. But the military could be doing anything in there. Didn’t you hear about that research ship they found west of Darwin? I heard all those scientists are vegetables now from some secret Navy experiment.”

“The news said they were paralyzed.”

“Same difference. Don’t you think it’s possible they’ve got a team of boffins inside the base tinkering with some unholy technology not of this earth?”

“No. I reckon it’s got four blokes bored out of their noggins waiting for something interesting to happen. Besides, there are only three hundred and twenty people in Port Cook. Good luck keeping something secret from that gossipy lot.”

They were almost back to town when a thunderclap split the air.

“Where did that come from?” Knoll wondered. “There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

Something in the rearview mirror caught Wheatley’s eye. Dense black smoke was soaring skyward from the air base two miles behind them.

“There’s been an explosion at Talbot. We need to get to the station.” Wheatley stepped on the gas. Both he and Knoll were members of the volunteer fire brigade.

Knoll twisted in his seat and gaped at the column of smoke. “It had to be the alien technology. Maybe we’ll get a chance to see it now.”