Underground (21 page)

‘You actually got clean away?’

‘Clean away,’ he nodded. ‘We hid during the day and walked during the night, for two nights, until we were out of the immediate search zone, then we hit a back road and got picked up, just as promised. By a couple of young greenies this time. They smuggled us to Adelaide, and handed us over to some lawyer, who hid us in his flat for a while. From there we moved to Melbourne, and then from house to house. Just with ordinary people, for the most part—a bit left-leaning, maybe, but nothing
outrageous. And it dawned on me gradually. These were
safe
houses. And this whole system was an
underground.
’

‘I get it. The Oz Underground . . .’

‘Not quite. But the beginnings of it. I could scarcely believe it at the time. The government was screaming blue murder about the escapees. They knew we were being ferried around the country by sympathisers. And there were all sorts of threats being broadcast—anyone caught hiding an escapee was going to have the book thrown at them. They were gonna face prison themselves. Total hysteria. And yet here were everyday Australians, most of them just average middle-class folk, nice and secure, and they were risking it all to hide us. They were so disgusted by Howard and his mob that they were engaging in actual subversive activity against their own government. It blew my mind. Lazy old Australia—the most unradical place on earth—and we had a secret resistance movement!’

‘And you stayed hidden? But you weren’t even a detainee.’

‘No. And once the real escapees were safely away and gone, I surfaced again. The AFP called me in, of course, and wanted to know where’d I’d been, but I just spun them some story about deciding to quit Woomera the day of the riot, and heading off on a holiday. They knew it was crap, but I didn’t give them anything else.’

‘And you’ve been in the Underground ever since?’

‘Well, the name didn’t come along until later. But I really think Woomera was the inspiration. That was the first time an actual
network
was set up. It took a lot of people to get those detainees to safety, and not just those doing the hiding. Some of the escapees were sick, so we needed doctors who were onside. We needed lawyers onside. We needed interpreters. We needed sympathisers from the Immigration Department itself. The incredible thing was that we could actually find people like that. And once all those individuals had discovered each other, and seen what they could do to circumvent some of the
government’s worst policies, hell, they weren’t going to forget it. Especially later, when the government and the security laws got even worse. And so the Oz Underground was born.’

‘And so here we are now.’

‘Yes. Here we are.’ He strode on in silence for a moment, boots crunching on hard sand. Then his head was shaking thoughtfully. ‘It’s funny. All these years in the OU, all the secrecy and the recruiting and the thousands upon thousands who joined us. And we’re still losing. Losing worse than ever. And here I am again. Running off into the desert to get away.’

He stopped, stared all about at the night.

‘At least back then me and the two Afghani boys knew what we were supposed to be doing, and where we were going. But us three . . .’

We had all stopped.

Aisha said, ‘Allah will preserve us.’ And the weird thing was, I didn’t think this was just one of her ritual utterances. I think she really meant it—that she was offering, in her way, some sort of support and understanding for a fellow rebel.

But Harry just sounded deathly tired. ‘You think so, do you?’ He pointed northwards. ‘Look.’

It was another helicopter, a blue light low on the horizon. It was too far away to hear, but a narrow search beam stabbed down from it towards the ground. And suddenly the night and the landscape did not seem so vast and empty anymore.

‘By tomorrow they’ll have found our tracks on that dirt road,’ Harry sighed. ‘Hopefully it’ll take them a bit longer to find the Humvee—but once they do, they’ll be right on our tail. It’s just a matter of following our footprints.’

We watched the silent light hovering for another minute or more, no one speaking. Then we turned in unison, and fled on.

The three of us were still walking at dawn. By then, we’d left the sandy plain of the night behind, and were trudging across low scrubby hills. Dreary country, and hard. We hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours and, for me, the march had taken on a tone of exhausted delirium. Even Harry was flagging, and had begun to look for somewhere to rest—a hole, or thick patch of scrub, in which we might hide ourselves. But there was nothing. Only a few fences that crossed our path, and alongside them the faded wheel marks of seldom-used tracks—both reminders that we weren’t in a real desert, but instead were traversing someone’s property, a cattle or sheep station. But how big a property we couldn’t hope to guess, let alone where it might end, or what lay beyond it, or where, at the last, we were headed.

‘The Murray River,’ was all Harry would say. ‘It’s south of us somewhere. And once we cross that, we’re into Victoria.’

Yet even in my condition, I could see that crossing the border did not magically make us safe. This was not a matter of state jurisdiction. Besides, any bridge would have a checkpoint and soldiers. But Harry was past arguing.

‘We’ll swim across,’ he insisted, plodding onwards.

The daylight grew, and the sun rose. Far away to the west, a tall line of dune-like hills blushed pink in the dawn, and cockatoos screeched in the scrub around us. There was not a cloud to be seen, and all of us were scanning the sky now, alert for the black dot of a helicopter, or even the sound of one. And indeed—just at the point were I was about to drop to my knees and demand to sleep, hidden from the searchers or not—there did come a sound. But it wasn’t a helicopter. It came from ahead somewhere, and it was the rattle of a small engine.

Harry paused, his head tilted. ‘Do you hear that?’

I stared at him blearily. He looked a mess. Bloody, dirty, unshaven, his eyes as red and swollen as mine felt.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘A car? A motorbike?’

Already I was imagining army troops or Federal Police patrolling for us.

But Harry shook his head. ‘That’s a generator.’

We crept cautiously towards the noise. It rose and fell deceptively, and after several minutes we didn’t seem any nearer. There were certainly no buildings in sight. It was as if the thing was underground. We scrambled up a low ridge, and from the crest looked out over a wide expanse of white sand—it was a lake bed, long dry, and a few miles across. The ridge upon which we stood formed its eastern rim. But the sound of the generator was loud now, and I stared, suddenly confused. At our feet, the ridge sank away into a gully—and the ground there abruptly turned from earth into some sort of
material
. A material littered with sand and clumps of dead scrub, so that it merged uncannily into the natural surrounds. For an instant I thought I really had started to hallucinate,
but suddenly the picture resolved itself. The material was shade cloth, stretched across the gully, forming a roof. We were looking at it from above.

‘What the fuck?’ Harry wondered aloud.

He led us down, until we were standing at the foot of the ridge. Ahead of us spread the white floor of the lake, burnt sterile by the sun. But looking back into the gully we could see, beneath the shade cloth, a deep, dim covered space.

I almost laughed. ‘Sweet Jesus.’

It was a greenhouse, full of the biggest and fattest marijuana plants I had ever seen.

I turned to Harry. ‘Can you believe this?’

Harry, however, wasn’t smiling. His face had gone wary, eyes roving, and from his belt he drew the pistol that he had kept from the massacre.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

‘Shut up.’

‘But it’s just someone’s dope crop.’

‘Exactly. A big one. With power, irrigation and a camouflaged roof. And something like this isn’t going to be just left here without—’

Two men stepped out from amongst the plants, rifles at their shoulders, aimed squarely at the three of us.

‘—guards,’ Harry finished, shoulders sagging.

‘Drop it,’ one of the men ordered.

Harry let his gun fall.

And I remember thinking—what the fuck is happening in this country? Supposedly we have some of the toughest firearms laws in the world. Officially, no private citizen is allowed to own a weapon of any kind anymore. And yet it seemed that
every single person
I’d met in the last few days was armed, as if the entire nation was swimming in ordnance. Where did it all come from? And then I was recalling things I’d read or seen on the news—how the army somehow manages to lose
ten per cent of its rifles every year, allegedly to a thriving black market run by conscripted soldiers; how murder and armed theft and violent assault are at record highs; and how odd it is that the more peace and safety and security from terrorists we have, the more guns the bad guys seem to possess.

We stared at our captors. They were Aboriginal, and even disregarding the rifles, they looked mean. Hard, hostile faces. Bare chests. Tattooed arms.

‘Hey,’ Harry declared, hands raised. ‘It’s cool. We don’t want any hassle here.’

The men glared. ‘You got it anyway, mate,’ said one.

‘We’re lost. We’re just here by accident.’

‘Yeah? Since when does the army get itself lost?’

Harry glanced down at his uniform in frustration. ‘We’re not in the army. We just . . . borrowed this stuff.’

The men exchanged puzzled frowns at that. But behind them, the marijuana crop waited, dense and tall, reaching almost to the shade cloth. I’d dealt a bit of grass in my younger days—and a plantation like this, it was worth big money. The kind of money that spoke of underworld gangs and crime bosses. The kind of money people killed for, puzzled or not.

‘Just let us walk away,’ Harry continued carefully, ‘and you won’t see us again.’

More hard stares over the gun barrels. ‘No one’s just walkin’ away.’

‘Look. We’re no threat. We’re out here trying to hide from the same sort of people that you are.’

‘What sort of people is that?’

‘The army. The police.’

‘Police? You got cops on your tail? Right this minute?’

‘Yes . . .’ Then Harry’s face fell, already seeing his mistake as the men’s eyes went deadly cold, their fingers tightening on the triggers. ‘No . . . I mean, not right behind us this
minute
.’

And it might have ended there, dear interrogators, all our days on the run—but at that moment an old black woman emerged from the plants.

‘That’ll do, boys,’ she said.

The men stared at her. ‘Mum, we got it covered . . .’

She gave them a swift glance, and snapped out a rush of words in another language. She was barely half their height, a round figure in a faded floral dress, with skinny legs and horned bare feet. But there was no doubting her authority.

‘No shooting,’ she commanded in English.

‘But they’ve seen the crop,’ one of her sons protested. ‘They’ll report it!’

‘This lot? Bullshit. They won’t be reporting anything.’ White wisps of hair escaped from under a tattered beanie on her head, giving her a half-mad look, but her eyes were perfectly sharp and aware, studying us. ‘I know who they are.’

Harry was amazed. ‘You do?’

‘Not you, maybe. But these other two? You bet.’

‘But . . . how?’

She rolled her eyes at him. ‘I watch TV, don’t I?’ She was pointing at me. ‘He’s the Prime Minister’s brother. He’s supposed to be dead.’ Her finger moved towards Aisha. ‘And her . . . Oh, I’ve seen
plenty
about her lately.’

Harry could only shake his head. After all the roadblocks and checkpoints, after all the people who’d seen our faces and not recognised us for an instant, this old creature had seen through us like it was the most obvious thing in the world. And she didn’t even have the grace to act surprised.

Meanwhile, her sons had not lowered their rifles. ‘They got people after them,’ one warned. ‘They said so.’

‘I’ll bet they have. This little girl here is worth half a million reward, last I heard.’

The men regarded us with renewed interest.

‘You all terrorists then?’ the old woman inquired.

‘No,’ Harry answered intently, ‘we’re exactly the opposite. The things you’ve seen on TV—they aren’t true. Look . . . I don’t know if this means anything to you, but I’m with the Oz Underground, and we have to get under cover.’

‘Ah. The Underground.’

‘You’ve heard of us?’

‘Yeah, I heard.’ But she didn’t seem terribly happy about it. ‘These people chasing you—they close behind?’

‘I don’t know. We dumped our vehicle last night, north of here, off the road. If they’ve found that, they will have found our tracks leading here.’

‘Dropped us right in the shit, haven’t you?’

‘We didn’t mean to.’

‘Don’t give a fuck what you
meant
to do.’

She sighed, and then turned to her sons, muttering something in her own tongue. The boys responded in what was apparent disagreement, but after further heated discussion a decision was reached. They shouldered their rifles, gave us all a dark glance, then headed off up over the ridge.

She watched them go, considered the three of us. ‘C’mon inside, anyway. No good you standing out here in plain bloody sight.’

We followed her in under the shade cloth and through the plants, the smell of marijuana warm and cloying.

‘Where did you send them?’ Harry asked.

‘To keep an eye out. And to clean up your mess. They’ll follow your tracks back a couple of miles, then see what they can do.’

‘You mean hide the tracks?’

‘Maybe. They can’t work bloody miracles though.’

‘Thank you.’

She was still displeased. ‘I’m not doing you any favours. I just don’t want the cops charging in here.’

The greenhouse seemed to hold hundreds of plants, and in the middle of them we came across the generator. It was powering a pump that stood at the head of an underground bore, from which water was diverted into black plastic irrigation pipes. The old woman hit the switch and the motor died. She frowned at us accusingly in the sudden silence. ‘And now my damn plants will have to go thirsty.’