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this purpose. ‘One last take. OK?’
    Before Banto had even nodded his final consent, Chancey plunged the needle deep into his arm muscle and pressed the plunger to pump in the fast-acting knock-out drug. Satisfied, he suddenly yanked hard at the harness, binding Banto tightly to the seat. The tiny native, only five feet two inches tall, struggled with superhuman strength, both physical and mental—but within a minute his battle was over.
    Wasting no time, Chancey jumped in beside him, started both engines and taxied to give himself every available metre for the very tight take-off. Only an Otter, with its reverse thrust, could have got in there in the first place. Revving up, he looked over at the lolling head of the once proud native warrior, hoping there was enough of the drug to keep him sedated for all of the fifty-minute hop over the mountains. There was still just enough compassion in him, however, to feel bad about what he was doing. He did not know why they wanted such a specimen, but he knew—not least from the big money they were paying him—that the future would be bleak for the likeable young man.
    Gunning the engines, and hurtling towards the prehistoric wollemi pines, he said out loud, ‘ Sori , but you planti big gol main for me. Planti big.’ It was with this ‘gold mine’ that he planned to get out of PNG and start that new life in Sydney. He had relations there and his room was full of the photographs they sent him. His dream was to open a restaurant—nothing too big—then find a wife and start a family. Maybe buy a boat...
    Suddenly, a sickening bang interrupted his reveries as the undercarriage firmly clipped a tall tree-top. No damage seemed to have been done, however, and Chancey reached for the radio to tell Bolitho the good news. They were on the way. ‘Get ready to break out some cold SPs, man. Some bias . You hear?’
    ‘ I hear you good, kauboi . Get that balus down here safely and you can afford champagne instead of beer.’
    The sound of Bolitho cheered Chancey up. Looking again at the native, he panicked briefly, afraid that he had died on him. But then he saw the chest gently rising and he relaxed, turning his mind to all those photos of Bondi Beach, the good life...and the women.
    *
    Tom Bates was having the time of his life. A little out of his depth, but as ever with Barton’s businesses, he was learning fast. And doing , not just consulting.
    ‘ These are the day’s trades,’ Bill Platt said, handing him the computer print-out. The three-month LIFFE Eurodollar contract did well for us. We bought forward Deutschmarks and shorted the Yen as an interest play. The US Treasury bond yields, of course, are still underpinning us nicely. So are the bond futures contracts. But we’re moving out of equities. Everywhere. Overheated. We think the markets are well due a correction.’
    ‘ Averaging what, overall?’ Tom had a prickly relationship with the older man, the Chief Executive of the small investment bank that Barton now effectively controlled.
    ‘ Better than you want. It looks like today’s yield was 3.25 per cent above LIBOR.’
    Tom frowned. ‘And the derivatives?’ His new team had put over ten per cent of the portfolio into complicated bear-spread put equity options, backing their pessimism. They had sold the right to ‘put’ into the market at today’s price 10,000 options as cover if the market started the bear trend they were expecting. As derivatives went, this was a fairly cautious play. But derivatives still frightened the hell out of him.
    ‘ Looking fine. Don’t worry. And yes—before you ask, we are marking to market in everything you see. No nasty shocks.’
    ‘ Fine,’ he said, satisfied that the man seemed finally to have got the message. The message that all Barton wanted was a modest turn on the huge capital flows he had brought in for them to manage. Emphatically not treasury speculation. Something the gung-ho security traders had real