Underground (17 page)

‘So anyway,’ Harry continued, ‘there was a kind of Underground operating in the navy from day one. A certain resistance to government directives. And it didn’t take long for the army and the RAAF to follow. Not after what they were forced to do in Iraq and in the other wars since. Like Daphne says. Bombing civilians. Torturing prisoners. Keeping all the government’s dirty little secrets. And for what? They know that none of this has a damn thing to do with protecting Australia. Then there’s the ultimate indignity—being at the beck and call of the US, as if we were just an auxiliary arm of their forces. Our people feel insulted.’

‘Fucking humiliated, more like it,’ the sergeant growled.

‘So yeah, to answer your question, the Underground has plenty of friends in the military. Not very high ranking. No one at the top command levels, for instance, or in the intelligence
arm. But there’s anger in the ranks lower down. Like—just whose army is it supposed to be? Whose country?’

And as if to illustrate his point, we crested a rise in the road and there, spreading out across the valley, seemingly as far as the eye could see, were the lights and buildings and illuminated flagpoles of Base Amberly.

‘Avert your eyes, ladies and gentlemen,’ intoned our driver, ‘and look neither to your right nor to your left. For what we are about to witness does not officially exist. And God bless the United States of America.’

Amen, sister.

Now, this is something I may not have told you, interrogators, but I actually helped
build
Base Amberly. It was only four years ago. Things were a bit slow in the resort trade at the time, and then I heard (through private channels, because it was never announced publicly) that the US military had decided to make Australia the headquarters for their South-East Asia operations. Japan had just thrown them out, after all, and what with Indonesia full of Islamic insurgencies, and the threat of China ever looming, the Yanks needed bases
somewhere
in the region. And, frankly, Australia was the last place where they could insist.

Although God only knows why the Pentagon opted to build the first and biggest of their new compounds on the site of the old RAAF base at Amberly. It’s hardly private, right there on the main road out of Brisbane. But that’s where they chose, and the word went out that they needed to erect accommodation for nearly one hundred thousand personnel. Which sounded like a pretty juicy plum to me, so I put in a tender, and won a bid for part of the construction. But don’t get too excited, interrogators. My company only built barracks and dining halls. I had nothing to do with sensitive areas like the airstrips, or
the secret radar installations—let alone the silos for the nukes, if rumour is true, and the bombs really are down there.

The madness of it was that, even though the money came from the US, at no stage were we allowed to refer to it as an
American
base. Strict government policy has long since declared that there are
no
US bases in Australia, and never will be. Just joint American–Australian training facilities.

Yeah. Right.

There were certainly no Australians around as we passed by Amberly that night. For twenty k or so the highway runs directly beside the base perimeter, and there were several checkpoints along this section to monitor the passing traffic. They were manned entirely by American troops. They had no interest in us, of course, with our Humvee and with our military passes. But in truth, they didn’t seem to be examining anyone very closely, just lazily waving most of the cars through. Otherwise they were slouching about in boredom with guns at half-mast, smoking cigarettes, or reclining in their vehicles, feet out the window.

Our driver was disgusted. ‘Look at these brainless turds!’

‘Conscripts,’ Harry noted. ‘The US is as stretched as everyone else. They’re not gonna waste crack troops in a place like this.’

‘Exactly. So we get a bunch of jerk-off beer-gut national guards—and they’re in command of Australian roads. It sucks!’ She took a deep breath. ‘But that’s what we have to put up with, ladies and gentlemen, seeing we lost the war.’

‘Which war was that?’ I asked.

‘The big one, sweetheart. World War II.’

‘Um, we lost that, did we?’

‘How else can you figure it? If a country ends a war with its soil occupied by the army of a foreign power, then it lost that war, pure and simple. Sure, Japan and Germany were the obvious losers in 1945. But England and Australia—we ended
up under American occupation too. Just because we asked the Yanks in and called them allies doesn’t mean a thing. We
owed
them big time after that, and they’ve never let us forget it. We’ve trotted off to every dodgy war of theirs ever since.’

‘You’d rather we ended up under the Japanese?’

‘Who says we didn’t? The Japs sure came out of it all stronger than we did.’

‘Apart from the fact they got nuked.’

‘Yeah, well, we’re almost level on that score now, aren’t we?’

And she had me there.

‘Okay,’ Harry conceded, ‘we were stuffed either way in that war. We just weren’t capable of real independence back then. But the point is, things have changed. We
are
capable now.’

Daphne spat out the window. ‘I don’t see any sign of it. Used to be the poms calling our shots, now it’s the Yanks. Obviously we’re a dipshit little country that needs great and powerful friends around to stop us wetting ourselves. Only—and forgive the fucking language—we don’t need to get on our knees and suck their bloody cocks too, do we? We aren’t
that
pathetic, are we? Jesus, even fucking New Zealand has more balls than we do these days, and that’s a dipshit little country if ever there was one—no offence meant to the poor buggers.’

And Harry was laughing.

But eventually the road began to climb up into the hills of Cunningham’s Gap, and the lights of Base Amberly sank behind. Daphne mulled away into silence, and after cresting the range, we rolled without speaking across the lush highlands of the Darling Downs, aiming for Warwick. I’d been half-expecting that at Warwick we would turn left and head down the New England Highway, towards Sydney. But we didn’t turn at Warwick. We drove straight on, westwards, for another two
hours, and it was only at Goondiwindi that we turned south and finally crossed the border.

‘Where the hell are we going?’ I asked, as Queensland slipped out of sight.

‘Bush,’ was Harry’s only reply.

I was never much one for the Outback.

The stunning vistas, the colours, the sunsets, the history and the characters, the wide open spaces of desolation, the grandeur of the oldest land on earth . . . Oh yes, I’d read all the brochures. But there were no beaches, you see. No golf courses. No casinos. And hence, no need of developers like me. I wasn’t about providing
adventure
, I was about providing luxury spa tubs and twenty-four hour room service. Most of all, I was about providing ocean views. ‘Going bush’ for me and my kind usually meant no more than straying too far inland to smell the salt air.

So this trip was all new ground to me. From Goondiwindi down to Moree, then a right turn across to Walgett, and westwards on to Bourke, which we hit around dawn, after a long night in the Humvee, and something like twelve hours since leaving Brisbane. But we didn’t stop there. It was onwards still, southwest, along an interminable sandy track that followed the banks
of the empty Darling River, three hundred kilometres and more with barely a sign of life except a lone pub at Tilpa, halfway, and an encounter with a rock which did something to the gearbox that took Daphne several hours to repair. We hit the highway again briefly at Wilcannia, but after that it was back to more dirt roads, and south-west still, all the way to a little place called Menindee. But we didn’t stop there either. Late afternoon—coming up on twenty-four hours straight since Brisbane—found us jagging back to the south-east, towards somewhere named Ivanhoe, the road reverting to sand as it passed through terrain that looked to me like virtual desert.

The middle, in fact, of nowhere.

And really, I should have something meaningful to say about such a long drive—some sort of observation, perhaps, about this huge spread of country that I’d never seen; a recognition, in my moment of strife, of the imperturbable vastness of Australia, and of my roots in its soil. But for most of the time I was grainy-eyed with exhaustion, or half asleep. All I remember now is, I dunno . . . service stations. Stopping to fill up with diesel; always, it seemed, at broken-down little places with ancient bowsers and mangy dogs wandering about. And the smell of dead animals—kangaroos and cattle—by the road. And bad food from dingy takeaways. And no one talking much. And Daphne at the wheel eternally, sucking back can after can of Coke to wash down little white pills that had to be pure speed. And tall fences on the roadside hung with ‘No Trespassing’ signs that indicated military zones or secret installations—dozens of them out there, belonging to who knows which government. And the olive drab of the scrub, and red sand, and heat and flies . . .

What the fuck were we doing out there, that’s all I cared about. And when were we going to stop? I badgered Harry with questions until, finally, after Wilcannia, he caved in and
admitted that in fact we had hours ahead of us yet. Our ultimate destination, it turned out, was Victoria. And Melbourne.

Melbourne! They were taking me back to my home town! And this mind-numbing excursion, zig-zagging all over far-western New South Wales, hundreds of miles out of our way, was simply, Harry said, to evade the search for Aisha and me. A matter of sticking to the backroads, to avoid trouble.

Well, it was a nice idea.

But about an hour south-east of Menindee, with Melbourne still a good seven hundred k away, and with the sun near the horizon, trouble found us even so.

Flashing lights appeared ahead, and at first I thought it was a checkpoint, even way out there. But closer inspection revealed that it was an accident. A semitrailer had run off the narrow road and overturned. A white four-wheel drive was parked nearby with its hazard lights on. At a glance the situation looked innocent enough—the truck crashed, a passer-by stopped to help. But then I noticed two men standing beside the four-wheel drive. They were in uniform, one of them waving urgently at us to stop. And far more suspicious, about fifty yards off the road, thirty or so people were sitting in the sand.

‘Shit,’ said Daphne. ‘What do you want me to do?’

Harry considered briefly. ‘Pull over. It’d look strange otherwise.’

And as we pulled up, I saw that the group of people—they were all male—weren’t just sitting there for the hell of it. They were under the guard of two more men who were brandishing what looked like automatic weapons.

‘Thank Christ you guys came along,’ the man at our window said. He had a bloody nose and an air of panic about him. ‘We’ve got a fucking mess here.’

Harry cast an eye over the scene. ‘What’s the problem?’

The man produced a badge from his back pocket and displayed it a moment, his hand trembling. ‘We’re with Dextron Security, on contract for the Department of Citizenship, escorting this transport of detainees. The fucking truck had a blow-out, and now we got three dozen of these bastards out in the open with only four of us on guard. They’ve already made one run for it.’ He wiped at his injured nose. ‘It got ugly. Fights. Shots in the air. We barely held them back.’

So he was a security officer. A prison guard. And in the back of my mind the question had been hovering—where did all those men sitting in the sand come from? Not from the four-wheel drive. And the truck carried only a shipping container. But then I saw that the doors of the shipping container were split open, and that it was empty now, and then I looked at the thirty-six men again, and understood.

Harry’s tone was hard. ‘We can’t really stop, mate. Army business.’

The officer blinked. ‘Are you kidding? These men are a Grade One flight risk! We’ve radioed in for help, but that’ll be an hour getting here at least. We need you guys right now!’

I watched the back of Harry’s head, appreciating his dilemma. This was the last thing we needed to get mixed up in. But if we were genuine army, there was no way we could have just passed on by. The man would report it.

‘All right,’ Harry said tightly. ‘We’ll give you an hour.’

‘Great,’ the officer said, relieved, and turned back to his own vehicle.

Harry gave me and Aisha a look. ‘Let me or Daphne do all the talking. Just act dumb and do whatever we tell you to do.’

We climbed out into the fading light. The smell of hot metal and burnt oil from the prone truck lingered in the air. We headed over towards the security officer, who was waiting by his four-wheel drive.

He stared at us in renewed astonishment. ‘Don’t you have any guns?’

Harry shook his head. ‘We’re communications, not combat.’

‘Jesus. But you’re still soldiers, right? You know how to shoot, don’t you?’

‘Sure.’

‘Lucky we got spares then.’ He dived into the back of his vehicle, and pulled out more weaponry. Two automatic rifles, and two hand guns. ‘Who wants what?’

Daphne and Harry exchanged glances, then divided the guns between themselves, a pistol and a rifle each.

‘What about those two?’ the man asked, nodding towards me and Aisha.

Daphne shrugged. ‘They’re not rated for these firearms.’ And even coming from a warhorse staff sergeant, it wasn’t a very convincing lie.

‘For fuck’s sake! Who cares? We gotta form a perimeter around those detainees. I don’t give a shit if they’re rated, just give them a weapon.’

Another glance between Harry and Daphne. But what choice did they have? In the end, Aisha and I each got a pistol. And there was no mistaking the look in Harry’s eye as he handed Aisha—terrorist and madwoman—a loaded gun.

‘Right,’ the officer said, leading us over towards the prisoners, ‘We get in a circle, twenty yards out, and if any one of those fuckers makes another run for it, shoot them.’