Death is Forever

nights and more days of relentless heat, stifling humidity, the sun a hammer flattening everything, the air a torpid beast suffocating whatever survived the sun’s savage onslaught.
    “God damn this weather,” Cole said viciously.
    Erin didn’t hear him. Her headset remained in her lap, allowing the helicopter’s noise to cut her off from the man she’d given too much of herself. But that was the way she’d always been—all or nothing at all, life taken at full tilt or full stop, nothing in between.
    Even Hans’s brutality hadn’t changed that. Nothing would. It was simply the way she was.
    The world shifted sharply, almost angrily, as Cole changed the heading of the helicopter, turning it onto the short north leg of the station’s nearly rectangular holding.
    Erin positioned the map to match the new direction and looked down at the land once more, watching for something new, something different, something to lift her spirits. She saw ground that was seamed, worn, bleached, a land lying exhausted beneath the combined weight of humid air, sunlight, and incomprehensible time.
    Unhappily she admitted to herself that in many ways Crazy Abe’s legacy was as bitter a disappointment as finding Cole in Lai’s arms. Both Cole and the legacy had seemed to promise Erin a new world, a world where she could shed the dead weight of the past, freeing herself to explore the possibilities of life.
    Both legacy and man had promised her hope.
    Both had proved to be less than they seemed.
    Crazy Abe’s legacy was a steamy, gritty, time-ridden hell. Cole Blackburn was a man who couldn’t resist the lure of one woman even while he was another woman’s lover.
    The dream was becoming a nightmare. She was alone and unarmed in the killing fields of the diamond tiger.

29
Over Abe’s station
    Broodingly Erin unfolded another panel of the map, held it against the hot air boiling through the open doors of the helicopter, and went back to the solitary game of matching land features with marks. The only useful marks on the map were the ones Cole had carefully written in. His symbols indicated the rare seeps and important geological boundaries, the dry watercourses, and the random lumps of limestone poking through the rusty surface, bringing relief to a land worn nearly flat by time.
    A line of compact gum trees showed startlingly green against the landscape, catching her eye. She looked more closely, saw that the trees traced an otherwise invisible watercourse between two ragged black lines of limestone, and checked the map. Frowning, she looked down again. After a moment she picked up her headset and put it on.
    “Are we still flying the northern leg?” she asked.
    Cole shot her a glance. Behind the sunglasses her eyes were unreadable shadows. “Yes.”
    “Headed for Dog One?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Then we have a problem.” She pointed to the trees below and then to the map. “The northern boundary is here. Dog One is here. We’re here.”
    “And right here,” his finger stabbed the map, “is something I want to look at.”
    “What?”
    “Those limestone ridges. I think they might be remnants of an ancient reef, but they could have formed in some other way.”
    “What difference does it make?” she asked.
    For a moment he was tempted to ignore her cool pursuit of geological facts and make her talk about something more personal. But he didn’t. If she separated herself from him any more, she would be brought down and gutted as quickly as a lone lamb found by a wolf pack.
    He and she had to stand together—if not as lovers, then as business partners.
    “If the ridges were part of a reef, the coastline was nearby,” he said evenly. “Where there’s coast, there’s beach. I’d love to find another Namibia. Except the beach sands here would have been changed to sandstone, unless the sandstone has already been eroded away a grain at a time, making loose sand all over again.”
    “Is that possible?”
    “Where do you think the sand in the deserts came from, if not from rock?”
    She blinked. “I never thought about it. You mean sand becomes sandstone becomes sand becomes sandstone?”
    “World without end,” Cole said, echoing Erin’s earlier words. “The surface of the earth has been recycled again and again as continental plates meet and devour each other. Nothing survives subduction intact, not even diamonds. But the Kimberley Plateau hasn’t been recycled for a billion and a half years. It’s