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at staggered intervals
and capturing crocodiles.
    Six months earlier, a small team of the
Commission’s rangers had spent five days flying over the area where
the boat had been reported. On one occasion they’d spotted what
appeared to be a boat. It was on a narrow, winding tributary of the
Adelaide River, difficult to observe for very long because of the
thick canopy of forest. They’d radioed the location back to HQ and
the Commission had organised help from the Northern Territory
police. They’d packed five armed officers into a four-wheel drive
and sent them into the region. The objective was to intercept the
craft whenever and wherever it banked first.
    Once again the phantoms were long gone. All
the police found were the remains of a day old camp on the
bank.
    There had been no further sightings or
rumours for five months, until just five days ago when a Flying
Doctors aircraft, diverting from its normal route to avoid a storm
centre, radioed the police with the sighting of a boat heading
toward the northern swamplands. The Flying Doctors, like all land
and air services in the region, had been asked to report any boat
sightings in the desolate outer-lying reaches of the Territory.
    The Wildlife Conservation Commission’s chief
executive, Harold Letterfield, acted quickly. There was no point,
he decided, sending out planes or boats or a consignment of police
– not into country like that. Instead he teamed the best Aboriginal
tracker available with the fittest officer with the most field
experience. Their brief was to follow the riverbanks, on foot,
locate the hunters and keep track of them without being seen. They
were to radio through the hunters’ movements on a regular daily
basis. In the meantime, Letterfield had both rangers and police on
standby with land and river craft.
    The moment these poachers were on their way
back and in more accessible areas, Letterfield’s combined forces
would pounce.
     
    That night it was Walter’s turn to take first
watch. They’d been lucky thus far for the first two nights. No
crocs or wild bush animals had approached their campsite.
    Greg couldn’t sleep. He listened to the
relative silence of the night – the birds were quiet – and despite
the humidity he felt an uncharacteristic shiver run through
him.
    It was over twenty years since the Government
outlawed the hunting of crocodiles. The saltwater crocodile, facing
extinction at that stage, had become a protected species and in the
two decades since then, their numbers had flourished once more.
    There had, of course, been isolated incidents
of hunters defying the Protected Species Act. But nothing like
this.
    Despite the shiver that touched his spine,
Greg was looking forward to the morning. He had a love of all types
of wildlife and he held a passionate belief in the Act and in the
Commission’s role in upholding it. He knew that Walter felt the
same. They both wanted to see these hunters stopped, and brought to
justice.
    But the shiver persisted, bringing with it a
strange sense of dread.
     

 
     
     
     
CHAPTER FOUR
     
     
     
    The mud flats were exposed on both sides of
the river: wide, sloping mounds with reeds eddying the water, the
river at low tide. The mangroves were swept by a brisk, warm wind.
Greg Kovacs opened his eyes groggily, uncertain at first of where
he was or what had happened. He blinked and looked about, taking in
the banks overgrown with bush and trailing vines, and the low,
swirling water. He was in an upright position, knee deep in the
water, his arms outstretched, something digging into his
wrists.
    Rope. Thick coils of it, strung between the
overhanging branches of trees. He tried to move and couldn’t, and
the rope cut deeper into the tender flesh of his wrists. Slowly, he
began to remember: Walter had woken him before the dawn, whispered
to him to stay quiet. The tracker had heard sounds that he believed
were those of men. He told Greg to remain still and alert and to
wield the