Free The Killing Chase (Beach & Riley Book 2) by Craig Hurren

it.”
    “Relax - I’ve got this. Just give me ten minutes.”
    Jake finally acquiesced, and Dozer pulled the door closed behind them. To Jake, standing in the hall, seconds seemed like hours. He was angry and frustrated and powerless, all feelings he wasn’t used to. This went counter to all his years of disciplined training and operational experience. Desperately fighting what he considered weakness, he looked anxiously at Dozer. “What the hell makes you so sure he can pull this off?”
    Dozer smiled knowingly. “Let me tell you a little story. In the SAS, one of the tests they put you through is survival skills. Pretty much like you Yank blokes, I guess – except on one test, they used to drop you in the middle of the Simpson Desert with nothing but the clothes on your back, a knife, a stinking half-rotten raw chicken, part of a plastic rubbish bag, and three swallows of water in a canteen. You’ve got three days to make it to the nearest town before they come looking for you – or your corpse. It hits over 120 degrees in the daytime and bloody cold at night. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and nothing but fine red bull-dust and a bit of dried-up scrub as far as you can see. And you’ve got no bloody idea where you’re going.
    “It starts out okay – you know, all the guts and glory SAS shit they taught you in training, but after a while, walking alone in that heat with no water, and a rotten chook teasing your empty stomach, things start to go a bit screwy upstairs. You remember some of the techniques from the classroom and manage to find a few tidbits here and there. You know – grubs, crickets, scorpions, stuff like that. You even find enough green leaves to make a few drops of water in a makeshift still, but nothing can slake that thirst – there’s no feeling quite like that. The gnawing hunger is nothing compared to that brain-fogging, nightmare-inducing thirst.”
    Jake piped up. “I’ve done survival training in all terrains and conditions. What’s your point?”
    “All right, all right, the point is, most blokes crash out of the course during survival training – either voluntarily or otherwise, but my brother Harry is a different story. The bloke loves that shit. He likes it that much, he goes and does it on his own time whenever he gets the chance. I reckon he’s barking mad, but he likes it – and he’s bloody good at it too!
    “One trip, Harry was making his way through the desert when he came across an Aboriginal tribal elder sitting on the ground half-dead. The old bugger had busted his ankle and couldn’t walk, so he just sat himself down and waited. Harry reckons he wasn’t the least bit surprised to see him walk up. It may sound crazy, but Harry says it was like he was waiting for him to arrive and carry him out of there. The middle of the bloody Simpson Desert, and the bloke’s just sitting there like he’s waiting for me brother to breeze through and pick him up on his way to church or something – bloody weird!
    “Anyway, the upshot is, Harry carried the old bloke for miles to the nearest cattle station, and they radioed the Royal Flying Doctor Service to go pick him up. While they waited, the Aboriginal started telling Harry some stories. They talked for hours on the patio of this big cattle station, and when the plane got there, he told Harry to go out to his settlement and visit him after he got fixed up.
    “Well, when he got back to base, our unit got shipped out on a mission for a couple of months, but as soon as we returned, Harry headed straight out to see the old bugger in the desert. I told him he was barking mad, but he wouldn’t have a bar of it. Anyway, he was gone almost two weeks, and when he came back to Townsville, he was different. Don’t ask me how – he was just bloody different. Something inside him had changed.
    “Next mission we went on, we captured a mid-level terrorist cell member and had to ask him a few questions. I busted a few of his