Underground (15 page)

‘Watch it,’ Harry warned. ‘You have to be able to walk out of here.’

‘Fuck you,’ I replied, and carried on.

So the rest of the game was a little hazy for me, between my growing drunkenness and my distraction about the possible bomb. But there wasn’t much to see anyway, beyond the comedy of the American bowlers, who had developed an ungainly cross between a baseball pitch performed at a sprint, and a legitimate cricket delivery. To be fair, they did generate some good pace. Even some swing. But what they hadn’t quite got their heads around was the intricacies of
bouncing
the ball—of deviation, of the seam, of spin. Delighted, the Australian openers clubbed ball after ball to the boundary. The crowd was in fits. And even in the CIA box, faces looked unaccustomedly glum for a moment. After seven farcical overs, Australia was none for sixty-eight, and the only question left was whether the first ball of the next over would be hit for a six or a four to win the game.

Which was when the bomb went off.

It was on the other side of the stadium. I saw a flash of orange, and felt a solid clang that reverberated through the
concrete walls. Then came billowing clouds of smoke, and the sound of forty thousand people screaming.

In the box, all three of us had ducked out of our chairs instinctively. But the glass didn’t shatter, and Aisha was the first to rise again.

‘Told you so,’ she said happily.

Harry stared at her in amazement. ‘I
still
don’t believe it.’

Chaos had broken out below. Police and soldiers were running everywhere. The PA was bellowing instructions. People were surging from the stands, many of them overflowing onto the ground. The cricket players had already vanished. And opposite us, a whole section of grandstand, where maybe a thousand spectators had been sitting, remained enveloped in thick smoke.

‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ Harry was saying, gazing at the destruction with the guilty horror of a man who might have been able to stop it.

‘What do we do now?’ I demanded.

‘What?’

‘What do we do? The transfer? Do we go or do we wait here?’

‘We wait,’ he said, uncertain. ‘We wait . . .’

His attention remained on the bomb site. An upwelling of air was wafting most of the smoke away, and figures were emerging. People. Coughing and dishevelled, but walking. And as more smoke cleared, I could see that relatively few actually seemed to be wounded or incapacitated. A little stunned, yes, but not hurt.

‘What the hell is this?’ Harry said, growing puzzled.

Outside our box, I could hear boots running and voices yelling about evacuation. Abruptly, our door burst open. We whirled around to see an Australian Army officer standing there, flanked by two privates.

‘Clear this box!’ he yelled, but then, bizarrely, all three stepped inside and closed the door behind them.

Harry didn’t seem at all surprised by the visitors. ‘Have you seen this?’ he said to the officer, gesturing to the view out the window.

‘Damnedest thing,’ the officer agreed. ‘Looks like it went off in a stairwell, not in the stand itself. And more like a smoke bomb than something designed to kill. Weird.’

‘Aisha here said she knew something was going off today.’

Military eyebrows went up. ‘Really?’

‘I didn’t believe her. Otherwise I would have told you. Sorry.’

‘Later. Right now we gotta go.’

‘It’s safe?’

‘Hell, in all this mess, we’d never get a better chance.’ He glanced at Aisha and me. Nodded to one of his privates. The soldier tossed three bundles of clothes at us.

I stared at the clothes blearily. They were uniforms.

‘Get dressed,’ the officer ordered.

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

Harry was nodding urgently. ‘It’s our ride. Put on the damn uniforms.’

The officer winked a greeting. ‘You just got drafted, son.’

My brother’s elevation, in the wake of 9-11, was to the newly created position of Special Minister Assisting the Attorney-General. Not an imposing title, perhaps, but in fact the Special Minister’s role was to formulate Australia’s response to the new threat of terrorism. This meant liaising between, and focusing the attention of, a whole range of different bodies—the military, the security groups, immigration, police and so on. The word ‘assisting’ meant that the Attorney-General was still officially in charge of it all, but effectively, Bernard was now Australia’s anti-terrorist supremo, and chief enforcer to boot.

The appointment certainly came as a surprise to me. And an upsetting one, because it meant that I’d lost my free ticket into the portfolio of Local Government. There was no business or financial advantage for me in having a brother as a
security
minister. But other political observers were puzzled too. The Liberals had won the 2001 election largely by promising to
defend the nation more aggressively than anyone else might. So this new portfolio was a big deal. It was the jewel in the ‘war on terror’ crown. Yet it had been given to a relatively obscure minister like Bernard. Why?

Insiders, of course, knew the answer. But it would be a couple of years before I really understood it myself.

That happened on the day the US President came to town.

Actually, we all got a clue that day—23 October 2003—our first hint of what sort of Australia lay only a few years ahead. The location? Nowhere else but poor, benighted Canberra. You won’t remember the day, dear interrogators. A very minor event in your view of the world. But it was a huge thing here—President George W. Bush himself, jetting in to our capital city to personally thank our Prime Minister for standing firm in the coalition of the willing against Iraq. Okay, so George W. was on a whistlestop tour of the whole world right then, thanking allies left, right and centre, and Australia was getting less of his time than most. But still—the honour of it! And the kudos for John Howard, to spend a whole day at Bush’s side, sunbathing in all that superpower glow and glamour.

For the residents of Canberra, the honour was a little more mixed. After a night rendered sleepless by the constant drone of helicopters and the shrieks of patrolling jets, they emerged at dawn on the twenty-third to find their city occupied by the US. Not that anyone was surprised by the basic fact. Everyone had been warned, after all. The President was terrorist target number one, and if we wanted to be blessed with his presence, then surely we understood the necessity of some inconvenience for the sake of protecting him. And truly, no one argued with that.

What amazed people was the sheer scale of it. Until that day, Canberra (and the rest of the country with it) had barely heard of things like roadblocks and security checkpoints and armed soldiers on the streets. Now the city inhabitants found
all their major roads shut down, and Parliament House itself—where the President would be addressing a combined sitting of both Houses—locked off by a cordon a mile in diameter. Canberra was a small place, with a radial transport system. Block off a mile-wide circle right in the centre, and the city ceased to function. Commuters trying to get to work that day ended up hours late, if they made it at all, stuck miles out in the country on some insane detour around the no-go zones.

Everyone could have put up with that if they’d at least known that the Australian security forces were in charge. If
we
were calling the shots. We weren’t. For that one day it was obvious to everyone that sovereignty of our national capital had been handed over to the United States. We were not to be trusted.
Their
forces were calling the shots, and they were doing so with a ruthless lack of apology. It didn’t matter that we were their allies, their friends, their most fervent supporters on the international scene. Wherever the US President set foot was American territory, it appeared, and us Aussies could just get the hell out of our own country, thank you.

I was there myself that day, shunted out of my normal digs at Rydges by the US occupation and forced to endure a room in a cheap motel halfway out to bloody Queanbeyan. A bother, but even so, initially, I had no particular concern about what was being done to Canberra. I was only in town because I had a big-shot American hotelier in tow. He’d been touring my resorts pursuant to investing some much-needed capital, and to butter him up, I’d promised him a chance to see his own President in action. By some adroit pestering of Bernard I’d managed to obtain two passes to the public gallery of the House of Representatives. Not an easy feat, considering ‘the public’ had been strictly banned access to the chamber.

So it was with some satisfaction that my American companion and I sallied forth to Parliament House that morning, passes in hand. Overhead, helicopters and jets blanketed the
town. It really made you feel that you were at the centre of things, for once, even in sleepy old Canberra. (Whether they were Australian or American aircraft hardly seemed worth quibbling about. Indeed, the night before, we’d driven to the lookout on the top of Mt Ainslie to view the whole circus. We even managed a glimpse of Air Force One as it dived steeply towards the airport. At least, we thought it was Air Force One, but there was a lot of talk about decoy planes and so forth, so who really knew.)

My first doubts about it all only came when our taxi was stopped at a roadblock well beyond the edge of the security cordon, our destination still so far off in the distance that even the giant flagpole was barely visible.

‘Out,’ said the cab driver, after conferring with a man in AFP combat fatigues.

‘But we have passes,’ I replied.

‘Out,’ repeated the AFP man. ‘You walk from here.’

He might not actually have been an AFP man, of course. Rumour had it that the Federal Police (a modest department in those days) were so hopelessly stretched by the Americans’ demands that they had dressed up clerical staff in uniform to fill out their numbers on the street.

Either way, we got out and walked. We’d taken a roundabout route from the motel, and so were now approaching the new Parliament House via the old Parliament House—a pleasantly quiet and grassy prospect in normal times, rich with memories of bygone days in Australian politics. Today, though, the lawns were jammed with masses of police and protesters, already lining up for the first skirmishes of the day. Not that any of the protestors were likely to catch the President’s attention at that distance. Those with megaphones were being instructed to point them towards Lake Burley Griffin, directly away from the new Parliament House. And those with anti-American placards? Well, debate seemed to be raging about which way
they should point as well, just in case George, by some act of preternatural vision, might glimpse one from half a mile off.

We sauntered through the crowd rather pityingly, and made our way to the major checkpoint set up in Federation Mall. Our passes were approved, and we moved on. I was assuming that there would be nothing more until we reached Parliament House itself. I was wrong. We were stopped at another checkpoint, and then by roving security personnel to boot. Each time, our passes were examined with increasing severity and unhappiness. Questions were asked, other identification was demanded, enigmatic marks were scribbled on the backs of the papers. And while each checkpoint was manned, as far as I could tell, by Australians, I noticed a funny thing. Me, they didn’t like at all. I was just a civilian who had somehow scored an invite, but who obviously had no pressing reason to be there, and so was suspect. My friend, though—as soon as they heard his accent, all suspicion evaporated. An American! Yes, sir! Straight through, sir! It pissed me off a bit, to be honest.

Then we were on Capital Hill, and the glassy walls of Parliament House rose before us. And here there was very little pretence about who was running the day. The security stations at the front doors were surrounded by US personnel. And once again, they were not happy with me. Who was I? Why was I here? How did I get hold of a pass like this? In the end, I resorted to angrily explaining that I was the brother of the Special Minister Assisting the Attorney-General. Which worked surprisingly well. The Americans knew who Bernard was—he had been liaising with them directly about the President’s visit. So we made it through to the interior. And not everyone did. I saw one irate famous face—a Canberra correspondent for a TV network—being refused entry by resolute Americans because of some trifling error on his pass. And his cries of ‘But this is
our
Parliament House!’ were doing him no good at all.

There were even more checkpoints and roving inspectors inside, and by the time we neared the doors to the public gallery, I’d gone from pissed off to quite disturbed. ‘Where the fuck do they all come from?’ I complained to my friend. ‘Your guys must have brought half of Washington along.’

He smiled in amusement. ‘We’ve always got a lot of people in Canberra.’ He voted, he’d already told me, strictly Republican, and had links in high places. ‘I hear they’ve got tunnels and bunkers under the US embassy, stuffed with all sorts of secret service personnel. They reckon there’s even a tunnel that leads direct from there to here.’

‘I can believe it,’ I said, staring around. They did look as if they were pouring from some hole in the ground. A short distance off, an Australian news crew was being divested of a video camera, and a fight was nearly breaking out. Of course, everyone knew that cameras weren’t allowed in the House, so normally it wouldn’t have meant anything to me. Except that twenty yards away, at the entrance to the press gallery, an American film crew was sidling through the checkpoint, one of them grinning as the video camera tucked at his side was politely ignored by all. And even that didn’t really mean anything to me, at the time.

Then, after one last check of our passes, we were in. The House of Representatives, the seat of sovereign power. Okay, so most of the accents around me in the public gallery were American, but down in the chamber itself, reclining in their green leather seats, were the elected members and senators of the Commonwealth of Australia. No Yanks allowed. Except the President, of course. The sad truth was, Parliament wasn’t even supposed to be sitting right then. They’d called everyone back, at immense expense, just for this moment.