Snatched!

PROLOGUE They found Walter Tjapanangka lying in a shallow ditch at the side of the Namatjira/Kintore Link Road just a few hundred metres from where it intersects the Gary Junction Road. Walter had been shot once in the chest. He lay on his back, his lifeless eyes open, staring up at the searing central Australian sun. He bled out and died where he fell; on the hot, dusty ground. Flies in their hundreds swarmed in a noisy, buzzing frenzy around his face and chest, settling briefly in the blood that had soaked through his shirt and onto the talcum powder-like dirt beneath him before lifting off, flying around for a few seconds jostling for a better position, and then settling once again. The two boys who found him, teenage brothers Billy and Henry Tjampitjinpa from Papunya, ten kilometres to the north, stood warily, several metres from the edge of the road and stared wide-eyed at the body, neither wanting to approach any closer. Fearful of offending against aboriginal spirituality and thereby hindering Walter’s passing into the afterlife, neither Billy nor Henry dared to speak the deceased’s name. They recognised Walter Tjapanangka immediately. Walter was a well-known identity in the Papunya/Haasts Bluff region and the brothers knew Walter had been on his way to Papunya with a bus load of school children on a day excursion from Haasts Bluff. So, where was the bus? Confused, they turned their eyes from the body and scanned the surrounding country. The school bus, and every one on it, was gone. DAY ONE