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[center][h2] The Billy Bus [/h2]

[h3] 10:37AM [/h3][/center]

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The journey was long and arduous - although there were some pretty obvious tire tracks heading down the road, they departed notably from it after only a few miles, and the rest of the path they led was over dusty rolling hills; the going was slow and occasionally dangerous, with some portions of the journey requiring that the heavier and less mobile van either make departures from the obvious tracks where the trucks had gone up an incline that the kombi couldn’t, and with other parts requiring that the passengers disembark and walk alongside it. 

Before long, the sun came up, and the heat of the desert woke up with it. Between the sweet smell of the cooking oil engine and the growing heat of the Aussie sun, rising fast against the stark blue of the outback sky, it was becoming increasingly clear that time was not on their side. 

As the team got further and further into the journey, the question of just how the bootleggers had been spotted all the way out here started to grow in its importance. They travelled for hours, and since leaving the dirt road there hadn’t even been a hint of civilisation - no other roads, no other buildings, nothing apart from some old electrical pylons carrying thin wires across the desert, stretched out like black strings pulled over the amber-orange dirt.

Five hours of slow work, five hours of painstaking tracking, five hours until they found [i]anything[/i].

There was a small plume of smoke - around the size you might expect from a poorly maintained campfire or barbecue or something - just over the next hill. Hans pointed it out, and Billy stopped the van. With a little more investigation, it quickly became evident that this was indeed the hideout of whoever it was that had hit the ‘leggers - or at least that the tracks left by those people led here, and that both the trucks involved were parked out front.

The base itself was a simple affair, composed of two beat up old caravans that had clearly been there for a long time, and a large red van with its hood open and engine very conspicuously missing. All three of these were arranged in a semicircle - or at least as much of one as could be achieved with only three components - around a firepit, which was the source of the smoke by which the place had been identified.

Most pertinently, there were four people outside, all huddled around a fifth person - who was lying on the floor.

Second most pertinently, the coolbox was nowhere to be seen.

[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/eYIvdMM.jpg[/img][/center]

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