32 At around ten thirty-nine pm, a beam of light the diameter of a football field flooded through the dense band of cloud hovering above the region, centring on the Wilton dump where Matt Wilcox had spent many a long, hot day at work. It blinding everything within a hundred yards, turning the trees of the surrounding forest into tangled, shimmering cut-out figures. In Biloela, Larry Schmidt, better known to mates as Schmidty, was talking to the bar-keeper, Ray Longfellow, out the front of the Biloela Hotel. Ray, a dirty, disheveled dishtowel slung over one shoulder and a cigarette jutted between his lips, was leaning against one of the pubs supporting beams and eying the road in silence. Ray's head would turn to follow the headlights of the occasional passing car. When he saw the halo s

