Thirty minutes before Quantas Flight 504 out of Sydney via Brisbane was scheduled to touch down at the little airport on Hamilton Island, Basil Ayton unbuckled his seat belt and stumbled down the narrow aisle to the lavatory. The mirror in the tiny cell confirmed his suspicion that a combination of jet lag, upset stomach, a headache and a very sore back made him look as bad as he felt. His adventure had begun four days earlier when a telephone call to his retreat in northern Canada jolted him out of a deep sleep. Since then, Basil had spent over 29 hours in the air in five different aircraft, making his way to the northeast coast of Australia. He was exhausted, cranky and disoriented, and a day behind the planned schedule. By this time he had also spent close to $30,000 on this venture and, although he wouldn’t discover the fact for another few hours, that money — not to mention his time and effort — had been completely wasted.
The telephone call had come in at 2 a.m.
“How’re yuh goin’ mate?” a cheery voice had shouted into the phone while Basil tried to clear away the wisps of a comfortable sleep.Without waiting for an acknowledgement, the voice had continued.
“Get your gear together, mate. There’s treasure waitin’ and you’re gonna want to be first in line.”
Basil forced himself out of the remaining vestiges of his slumber. “Smithey, confound it!” He had shouted too. “Don’t you ever look at your watch? Or your calendar? It’s the middle of the night here. And it’s winter! Freezing cold!”
Smithey didn’t miss a beat. “All the more reason to get goin’ mate. Bright sunshine here. Just thinkin’ of sheddin’ me shirt, in fact, or maybe havin’ a swim. Yuh wanna join me? And load up a pot of cash into the bargain?”
He didn’t wait for Basil to reply. “Look, I got the find of the century waitin’ here,” he said. “You’ve never seen a site like it. What’s that favorite word of yours — pristine? Well, this is pristine. It’s up by the Whitsuns and it’s completely intact. Nobody’s ever been near it.”
By this time, Basil was standing beside his bed. “Wait a minute, wait a minute, Smithey! Where are you calling from? Sydney? Cairns? And what kind of site … it’s in the Whitsunday Islands? They’re a national park those islands, aren’t they? That sounds like trouble.”
“No, no, not right in the Whitsuns. It’s a little chain a couple degrees north. Folks here call ’em the Boogers cause they’re mostly atolls and reef crags but one of ’em’s bigger. Site’s on that one and mate, you gotta see it! It’s … it’s … well, remember that dig we worked on up near Darwin some years ago? Just like that one but a bit smaller. I’d say up to four, five aboriginal families at any one time, maybe as many as seven or eight generations in the settlement but the thing is it’s …” There was a long breath. “It’s fresh! Looks like one day they just took off and left everything behind. Quake country up there y’know.”
While Smithey waited for reaction, Basil tried to evaluate. The Whitsunday Islands formed a small archipelago on the eastern coast of Australia, about midway between Brisbane and Cairns, in the Great Barrier Reef. Some islands were inhabited and private; others had been turned into commercial vacation spots. It just didn’t make sense that in an area as popular as the Great Barrier Reef an early aboriginal settlement, even a small one, could have gone undiscovered until now. Still, when people visited the area they came to dive and snorkel and lie on the beaches; they didn’t come to roam around the islands. And one had only to think of recent archeological discoveries right underneath the streets and homes of teeming cities like Cairo and Damascus, even London and Paris, to realize that finding a pristine site near the Whitsunday Islands did not stretch the imagination.
Smithey had then broken the silence. “First trip in,” he said, “we’d hardly have to dig. There’s enough good stuff on the surface to turn a profit without even using a shovel.”
The thought of “good stuff” waiting to be taken almost without effort was what convinced Basil to discard any thought of more sleep. Over the next several hours, he got his gear together, wired Smithey the requested advance of $20,000 on his finder’s fee, canceled all his upcoming appointments and booked his flights.
Basil Ayton was a broker specializing in native art, but not the kind of specialist likely to be invited to conferences on archeology. His work was behind the scenes, servicing collectors whose passion for particular kinds of art and history encouraged them to ignore heritage and customs laws. The “good stuff” Smithey had referred to would be artifacts of aboriginal culture: weapons, utensils, carvings, children’s toys, maybe even a didgeridoo. An authentic one of those could generate a bidding war, and the thought that he might come up with a “doo” in perfect condition had done much to sustain Basil throughout the long and uncomfortable journey.
When he got off the airplane at Hamilton and didn’t see Smithey right away, Basil was not alarmed. After all, he had arrived much later than they’d agreed and quite possibly, even quite likely, Smithey was at the site. Still, Basil might have become a bit suspicious at the helicopter charter desk when his request for transport to “the Boogers” drew a complete blank with two agents who had no idea what or where he was talking about. But then an older gentleman had emerged from a back room in time to hear the exchange and chimed in.
“Can’t fly in there, mate,” he said. “No place to land. The Boogers is just mountain tops, really, peekin’ outa the reef. ’Cept for one a them and it’s the same, just bigger. Only way in is by boat.”
At that, the only emotion Basil had room for was annoyance, but even this cooled when the older man continued.
“Anders can probably take yuh there. If he’s sober. Ask for him over by the long dock, where the big launches are. If he’s around, that’s where he’ll be.”
As it turned out, Anders was indeed there. Moreover, he was both sober and willing and, within less than an hour, Basil and his gear were loaded.
“If that’s all, let’s be off then,” Anders said, drawing a hand and long index finger across the bottom of his nose. “She’s not a big boat and looks like there could be some weather soon. And we got to stop and pick up extra gas at the marina down the channel. Water too. None on the island.”
It was fully an hour later, when the boat was well out on the reef that Basil realized he had been stung. Although he knew it was probably jet lag that had muddled his mind and prevented him from immediately picking up on the fraud, the realization didn’t help very much.
What has led Basil Ayton to realize he has been taken?