Nash scrawled his name and pushed it back across the table.

‘This better be good, Frank.’

Douglas grinned broadly. ‘Robbie, it’s the Hoosenbeck.’

A shudder ran through Nash.

The Hoosenbeck?

The Southern Hemisphere’s holy grail of cave diving was a so-called ‘bottomless lake’ inside a vast cavern at the end of a sheer-sided river gorge, discovered by a Dutch speleological team in the late 1960s. Their weighted ropes had not hit bottom, and no one knew how deep it was, or how far it extended. The fact it was situated five or so kilometres inside Indonesian Papua, a ‘paradise lost’ of inaccessible rainforests and impenetrable mountains, where a vicious guerrilla war had raged for decades, had prevented any chance of further exploration.

Nash breathed out slowly. ‘Frank, you’re talking about my boyhood dream.’

‘I know, laddie.’

Douglas handed him a stunningly detailed aerial photo of the three-gorge Hoosenbeck system, a deep and narrow cut in the flanks of the Jayawijaya mountain range. Nash devoured the image with his eyes. Once liberated from its cave, the snowmelt-driven Hoosenbeck River ran fast and strong for twenty kilometres until it fed into the Sepik’s headwaters. All that rock-boring power had fuelled Nash’s suspicion that this system was linked to the Kaiserin, a mere ten kilometres across the border. On their last expedition, he had been tantalised by the possibility of making the connection below ground.

From his magic suitcase, Douglas presented Nash with a contract. The fee almost made his eyes pop out of his head.

‘You can write about the expedition afterwards –’ Douglas tapped a threatening non-disclosure clause – ‘but not before. They want the scoop, you see?’ He handed Nash a pen.

The signature field seemed to swim before his eyes as Nash placed pen against paper. Then a vision of last night’s dream returned, of Natalie’s broken ribs, and his racing pulse slowed.

‘I need to think, Frank.’

Douglas shook his head in exasperation. ‘About what? This is all you’ve ever talked about. Remember our last trip to Lanzarote? Soon as you conquered that five-kilometre lava tunnel, we cracked the porto, and you started raving about the Hoosenbeck all over again.’

‘I know. It just doesn’t . . . feel right.’

‘Robbie, mate, you gotta see reason.’ Douglas stabbed the contract with his yellow forefinger. ‘It’s pay dirt, the big time. Are you telling me you can’t use the money?’

Douglas was breathing heavily now. Although he’d notched up decades flying the most dangerous skies on earth, PNG was flooded with young western pilots desperate for commercial hours and the school maverick was being left on the ground. And while the diving expeditions had got him out of penury, Nash knew the truth was he couldn’t afford to come home.