"No. They don't know where we are. They're just guessing. If we can make Motukokako, we can lose them." He patted the control console. "Come on, little submarine, you can do it."

Tane didn't smile. He felt sick.

Motukokako rose suddenly out of the seabed before them. A huge rock wall in the lights of the Mobius. Mobius. The pinging was getting louder now. The pinging was getting louder now.

"Here we go," he said, slowing the submarine down and crawling along the face of an underwater cliff. The currents were strong and volatile, throwing the small craft from side to side, but Fatboy kept the Mobius Mobius as steady as he could. as steady as he could.

Another cliff rose on the starboard side, and Tane realized that they were in the "hole," the short pa.s.sageway that cut right through the rock of the island.

When the rock walls disappeared, Fatboy steered to the port side and held the craft steady in one spot, using the motor to adjust for the currents that threatened to drive them back into the cliff. The pinging grew in intensity, but Fatboy shook his head at Tane's querying look.

"We are behind the island. They can't 'see' us here. But better get that periscope up and let me know when they come around the point."

Tane raised the buoy and tried to look around. It was difficult in the swelling waves, even with the gimbals that kept the camera steady.

The moonlight illuminated the edge of the island and sea beyond, but the water kept spinning the buoy around, and he had to constantly maneuver it.

The pinging surrounded them by the time Tane caught the first glimpse of the bow of the frigate, a dark silhouette against the moonlight.

"There she is!"

Fatboy was already turning the submarine, and rock surrounded them again for a moment as they ducked back through the hole in the rock.

Tane aimed his camera at the edge of the island just in time to see the stern of the frigate disappear behind it.

"What now?" he asked.

"Wait," Fatboy replied.

Less than thirty minutes later, the ship returned, but they were through the hole to the other side of the island long before it would have been able to ping them.

"It's like playing hide-and-seek," Fatboy laughed.

It sort of was, but Tane still felt sick.

They stayed in the shadow of Motukokako for another hour as the pinging receded into the distance. Only then did they start the journey back to Auckland.

Tane spent most of the trip sitting on the floor by Rebecca's bed, watching her. She woke up at one point, looked at him, and said, "Nothing makes any sense." But most of the way she slept. She vomited once or twice and he cleaned that up and rea.s.sured her gently that she was okay.

She had held her breath for him.

BAMBI Gazza Henderson poured the remains of his dinner onto the last embers of his fire with a hiss and a small puff of steam. of his dinner onto the last embers of his fire with a hiss and a small puff of steam.

The dregs of his coffee went the same way, but there was barely enough heat left in the fire to raise a sizzle.

Technically, the campfire was illegal here deep in the bush at this time of year, but rules like that were for hikers and tourists. He had been hunting in the forests of Northland for more than twenty years and felt as at home in the bush as he did in his own living room. He certainly knew how to put out a campfire properly.

He heaped earth on top of the fire's remains and stamped on that carefully, making sure there was no chance of residual warmth flaring up again later and causing a forest fire. He had no wish to do that. It would be like burning down his own house.

Bambi's cold dead eyes stared up at him from beside his pack. Bambi wasn't a fawn, like in the movie. It wasn't even a doe. He was a buck, a h.o.a.ry old stag, but Gazza always called the deer he shot "Bambi." It was a kind of twisted joke that had started when he used to go hunting with his mate Trevor in their teens.

This Bambi was a beauty. His antlers were worth at least two hundred on the Douglas points scoring system. Plus he had the Kaipara split in the antlers, which traced his ancestry directly back to the original fallow deer released in New Zealand in 1864.

The Kaipara split wasn't worth any extra points, but it was certainly worth a few pints in the clubrooms when he got back. Besides, he was sure that Bambi would take out the New Zealand record this year.

"Won't you, old boy," he said out loud. Bambi just stared at him coldly.

The sun was setting through the tall straight trunks of the kauri of the forest, and a light haze was rising as the day cooled. It softened the shadows of the trees, already elongated by the low angle of the sun, and gave the forest a quite otherworldly feeling.

Gazza debated with the dead stag for a while whether to de-head him and leave the body in the bush. He was a trophy hunter, a sportsman, he told all his mates, not a butcher, and the whole stag was a lot of weight to lug all the way back to Russell.

As he watched, the haze thickened into a light mist, swelling up around the tree ferns and rata vines. It seemed a bit unusual for this time of day. Mists were common in the early mornings, and many times he had awoken to find himself in a whitened-out world. But not usually in the evening when the land was still warm.

In fact, he couldn't ever remember a mist through the forest at sunset like this.

The tall kauri made ghostly spires as the delicate tendrils of the fog-for it really was turning into a fog-wrapped their way around trunks and through the fanned-out leaves of the pungas. Already those trees, more than twenty or thirty meters away, were dissolving into the mist, leaving a wall of white behind the trees closer to him.

There was a vague movement in the mist, more of a stirring than anything else.

"Anybody there?" he called out. He didn't expect there to be, but the alternatives were a deer or a Captain Cooker, one of the ferocious wild boars with razor-sharp tusks that populated the Northland forests.

He reached for his rifle but left the safety on. Hunting was a dangerous enough sport in the full light of day. But in the twilight, in a fog, it could be a death sentence. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot some innocent tramper, or another hunter, thinking it was a deer or a Cooker.

But at the same time, he didn't want to leave himself defenseless in case a wild boar did suddenly materialize out of the mist and charge toward his little campsite.

There were more movements then, more stirrings in the mist, around and in between the trees.

"Anybody there?" he called out again curiously, but not nervously.

The mist was thickening all the time, and he could see barely a few meters now. He had a strong sense that someone or something something was out there. He slid a round into the chamber of his rifle and flicked off the safety. was out there. He slid a round into the chamber of his rifle and flicked off the safety.

"I am a hunter," he called out. This time there was a slight nervous catch in his voice. "I have a rifle. Please identify yourself."

There was no reply, and all around him now, he had the sensation that the woods, the mist, were alive. Indefinable shapes swirled around him in the fog, ghosts amongst the trees.

A short while later, two rifle shots echoed through the tall kauri of the forest.

When Gazza hadn't returned by Thursday, December 17, his wife, Lorna Henderson, reported him overdue. Gazza was never back late from a hunting trip.

NEW Z ZEALAND'S M MOST W WANTED "I can't believe," said Tane with a serious expression, "that they fell for that corny old look-out-behind-you routine." with a serious expression, "that they fell for that corny old look-out-behind-you routine."

"Actually it was 'Oh my G.o.d,'" said Rebecca with a grin. She had woken up after that first miserable night feeling one hundred percent fine and full of vim and vigor, if with a slight raspy cough to remind her of her brush with death.

Tane wasn't sure if she knew just how close she had come to dying, or what he had had to do to save her life, and he didn't enlighten her. It was something that was probably best forgotten.

"Seriously, though," he said with a smile, "whoever those guys were, they were tough, they were hard, they were professional combat soldiers. And yet they fell for the oldest trick in the book."

"Who were they?" Fatboy asked, without any trace of humor. "And is there any way they can identify us?"

They were seated around the wooden dining room table of the West Harbor house. The journey back had been a slow one, creeping from bay to bay, point to point, watching, always watching for the sharp bow of a naval frigate. It had taken them four days, but the Mobius Mobius was now safely tucked away in the boatshed, away from prying eyes. was now safely tucked away in the boatshed, away from prying eyes.

"No, I don't think so," Rebecca said.

"What about fingerprints?" Fatboy asked.

"I've never been fingerprinted by the police," Tane said. "So even if they got my fingerprints on the island, they wouldn't help."

"I have," Rebecca said carefully. "After the Save the Whales march. And that was going through my mind the whole time after they captured us. On the rubber boat, we had our hands tied behind our backs, and when we got on board the ship, I was careful not to touch anything. Not even the guardrail."

Tane remembered how she had skipped lightly over it.

"What about the netting?" he asked. "When we climbed up the side of the ship."

Fatboy shook his head. "They won't be able to lift fingerprints off wet rope," he said. "I am almost certain of it."

"Which just leaves the air bottles and weight belts," Rebecca said. "Should we go back to the island and get them?"

"Too risky," Fatboy said. "They'll be watching the island from now on. Better just pray they don't find them."

"What I think we need to work out most urgently," Tane said, "is what they were doing there. There was minimal security when we visited the island a few weeks earlier, and then when we turn up, suddenly the entire fifth cavalry is waiting."

Rebecca nodded. "I think something bad has happened on that island."

"Something to do with those piles of clothes you found?" Fatboy asked.

"Maybe," she replied, "and the broken door."

"The soldiers might have broken that door down," Tane said hopefully.

"From the inside?" Rebecca reminded him.

"Well, at least it's off our shoulders now," Fatboy said. "Now that the army and the navy are involved, it's not our problem anymore."

"Thank G.o.d for that," Tane agreed.

"Maybe," said Rebecca without conviction.

Tane looked closely at her. "Maybe?"

"It's not up to us anymore," Fatboy said emphatically. "We tried. We failed. Let the authorities sort it out."

"They won't," Rebecca said. "Or they can't. Or they just don't."

"You've got to be kidding," Fatboy said. "They've got soldiers and scientists and...and...other stuff. Of course they can sort it out."

Rebecca looked down at the tabletop, which was covered with copies of the almost-complete diagram, neatly printed out on crisp new sheets from their new inkjet printer.

"Tane, Fats, if the authorities are going to sort it out, then why have we been getting SOS messages from the future? They are going to fail. Just like we failed. The only people who can sort this out is us-that is, if we can figure out these messages and do the right things. In time."

Tane caught the sting in the tail of that and glanced away.

Rebecca asked, "What about the Chronophone?"

With two computers working almost nonstop, they were quickly chewing through the backlog of BATSE data. There was now less than a third of the image to go. The plans lay tantalizingly close to completion in front of them.

"We can't build it yet," Fatboy said. "Not until we have the missing bit. But we could start buying some of the components."

"Where from?" Tane asked. "The local Chronophone shop?"

Rebecca laughed, and Fatboy said, "They're all just standard components, looking at the diagram. Resistors, transistors, diodes. We can pick them up at any RadioShack. But I'll get a mate of mine to look over it in any case. Goony. He's the electronics technician at the recording studio. What he doesn't know about circuit boards is not worth knowing."

"Will he help us build it?" Rebecca wondered out loud.

"Probably," Fatboy replied.

"Can we trust him?" Tane asked.

"I don't think we have any choice," Fatboy responded. "But anyway, he doesn't have to know what it does to a.s.semble the components."

"Hi, Rebecca. h.e.l.lo, boys," a new voice said, and they all looked up with somewhat guilty expressions. They hadn't heard Rebecca's mum come in.

"Hi, Mrs. Richards," Tane said. "How are you feeling?"