On Monday night, Callum and Ben’s time on the run came to a crashing holt when, unbeknownst to them, they were taken in by the brother of one of the Hunters tracking them down.
Receiving an unexpected call, Ground Hunter Kellie spoke to her brother who offered up the tech-savvy duo on a silver platter.
“I think it would have been impossible to expect that to happen to us,” Ben said with Callum adding that calling their situation a stroke of bad luck would be a massive understatement.
The pair had been playing a very strong game against the Hunters, explaining that their strategy from the outset had been to overload HQ with information.
“It was to give [the Hunters] too much to process and handle,” Callum explained. “So many different people were sending messages and different things were happening all at the same time, it meant that the Hunters had tons of information but none of it was really relevant to tracking us down.
“You can kind of see that… our whiteboard is quite full, but there’s nothing that’s really giving them a definitive hit in our direction,” he added. “It felt like it was working, that’s for sure.”
“They weren’t too impressed with us,” Ben added, laughing, “we managed to piss the Hunters off very quickly.”
And while their overall strategy seemed to be working, there was a moment of temporary trouble that led them into the most unlikely trap. After camping on a mountain, the pair were struggling to figure out the best steps to get them to their next destination.
“The main goal was getting off the mountain, that was our problem statement,” Ben explained. “It was one we couldn’t quite solve in a nice, clean manner.
“Up until that point, we felt confident with our moves and then, suddenly, we were in this position where we had a couple of options and none of them felt as safe and guaranteed as the previous days,” Ben continued.
Making their way to a train station, the pair ran into what appeared to be a Tradie with a heart of gold. Using his phone to try and reach some contacts, the pair were unsuccessful, but that’s when he offered them a place to stay at his remote property.
“We felt pretty confident because, at that point in time, there wasn’t a way for the public to turn us in,” Callum said. “There wasn’t a tip line, there weren’t posters… there wasn’t really a way for any person to easily get in contact with the Hunters.”
“There was no way they could have gotten hold of us because it’s the first time in town, the first person we chose to speak to,” Ben added, “from our point of view it was like an absolute safe bet.”
After a hike off the mountain in the hot sun, the pair were exhausted and the thought of somewhere to sleep was too enticing an offer to refuse, so they walked right into a trap, with Kellie immediately getting in touch with HQ as soon as her brother told her exactly where the boys would be.
While it is a case of the most extreme bad luck, Callum and Ben have come to terms with how their time on the run came to an end.
“Everything we were doing was working,” Ben said. “When Cal and I first got knocked out, that night was not an easy sleep but there was a sense that we had gone out on our own terms, and we hadn’t made some monumental mistake that led to our capture.
“It was very much the wrong place, wrong time and there’s solace in that. There’s peace in that. Despite everything, we were kind of okay that this was the end of our story.”
At the end of the day there are a few things the pair would do differently if they went on the run again.
“Don’t trust random tradies at the train station would be at the top of the list,” Ben said as the pair laughed.
