Death is Forever

intent, unaware of anything else…including the dust cloud following them.
    The first highway sign in fifty miles appeared just as the dirt road divided. The Gibb River Road continued straight ahead. The right fork led to Windjana Gorge and Tunnel Creek national parks.
    Cole turned right.
    “Not too long ago,” he continued, “a bright lab boy looked at the dark specks caught inside a diamond and wondered what they really were.”
    “I thought they were carbon,” she said. “You know, little bits of stuff that hadn’t quite made the grade to diamond.”
    “That’s what everyone assumed. Then someone looked. The stuff is pyrope, which is a special kind of garnet. You can tell how old pyrope is by measuring its radioactivity. The diamond the lab boy was looking at had come from a kimberlite pipe that was a hundred and thirty million years old. The diamond and its garnet flaw should have been the same age as the pipe. Instead, they were billions of years old.”
    “But then how did the diamonds get into the pipe? Wasn’t the magma hot enough to melt diamonds after all?”
    “No one knows. My own private guess is that there’s a diamond zone somewhere, way down in the earth, past the point where steel pipe bends and melts and rock flows like wax left out in the sun, down where the pressure and temperature are so great that diamonds were squeezed out as the planet itself cooled more than four billion years ago.”
    Unconsciously Erin’s hand went to the cloth belt beneath her shirt where twelve ancient pieces of crystal lay hidden.
    “When the earth cooled beyond a certain point,” he said, “the conditions for diamond formation were gone. And I mean forever. But the diamonds remained in a thin crystalline veil over the inner face of the earth.”
    She smiled, liking the image. “Then how do diamonds get up on top to a place where we can find them?”
    “Most of the time they don’t.” He flicked a glance at the side mirror. “Yet every once in a while the crust shifts and a needle of magma explodes through that diamond zone so hard and fast the diamonds don’t have time to melt be fore the rock around them cools. But most of the time, they melt. Only one in twenty pipes have diamonds.”
    Silently she tried to imagine a glittering diamond veil billions of years old, a fantastic crystalline residue of the birth of the planet itself.
    “What a shame,” she said finally, sighing.
    He looked away from the mirrors. “The diamonds that are destroyed?”
    “No. The ones that survive to be worn by bimbettes and loan sharks.”
    He smiled, but it was one of his old smiles. Bleak. The dust cloud had turned onto the Windjana road.
    Everything was fucked.

22
Western Australia
    Cursing steadily but too softly for Erin to hear, Cole rummaged in his kit bag on the backseat with one hand and drove with the other.
    “Can I help?” she asked.
    “See how fast you can put on your walking shoes,” he said. “Then steer while I put on mine.”
    After one look at his grim expression, she didn’t ask questions. She kicked off her thongs and put her shoes on quickly. Then she held the wheel with one hand while he jammed his feet into covered shoes. Inevitably the Rover slowed.
    “Thanks,” he said, taking the wheel again but holding the Rover to a slow pace. “Take the binoculars and see if there’s anyone behind us.”
    She found the glasses, adjusted the focus, and scanned the road behind them carefully. “There’s a white car.”
    “Is he overtaking?”
    She waited for the space of a breath. “No.”
    “Shit.”
    “What’s wrong?”
    His hands flexed on the wheel. “We’ve been followed since we left Derby. He’s a real cute one. We speed up and so does he. We slow down and he drops back. How many are in the car?”
    “It’s too far and too heat-wavy to tell.”
    Cole reached beneath the seat, pulled out the short-barreled shotgun, and handed it to Erin. “Ever use one of these?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. Keep it handy, but keep the safety on.”
    “What are we going to do?”
    “Run like bloody hell.”
    With no more warning than that, he gunned the Rover up and over a shallow crest and dropped down into a long incline. The accelerator hit the floorboard and stayed there, held flat by his big foot. The vehicle picked up speed rapidly, its engine screaming at full revs. The speedometer needle swung across the dial.
    Erin tried not to think about the assorted large wildlife that inhabited