by Steve Lewis
‘Xiu, our best analysts have compiled a report on what the assassination of the American president means for us.’
Meng pushed the document towards Jiang, clapped his hands and beamed.
‘It is as I thought, and great news for us. Washington is in disarray. It cannot lift its head from the quagmire it created in the Middle East. Russia is making it look like a fool in Syria and Ukraine. The Americans are weakened by years of trying to impose their will as the world’s police force and the people are sick of foreign wars. The new president faces an election next year and she is behind in the polls. She will spend every day fundraising and campaigning.’
Jiang picked up the document and flicked through its pages as the president continued.
‘I am accelerating our plans for militarising the South China Sea islands. I am planning to visit them and I would like you to accompany me, Xiu.’
The propaganda minister looked up from the report and nodded, but there was no hint of enthusiasm in his voice.
‘Yes, Mr President. I will ensure my diary is clear.’
‘We stand at an epic threshold,’ Meng declared, his voice ringing with confidence.
‘Our engineers are turning tiny reefs into islands that will sustain a population and will serve as unsinkable aircraft carriers. Our people are working diligently to ensure they are ready. They will be the talons on our hands as we grasp power from the delusional Americans.’
The president glanced at the map on his wall and his tone turned from triumph to menace.
‘Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam.’ Meng spat out the list. ‘They make foolish claims on the South China Sea based on incorrect data peddled by the Americans. We will not be dictated to by those who have no respect for our history.’
His face brightened.
‘Jackson’s death is an opportunity for us to move faster, push harder.’
Jiang continued to leaf through the report as he listened. He was frowning as he put the document down and tapped it with the forefinger of his right hand.
‘Mr President, I do not doubt the skill of those who wrote this.’
He paused and Meng could sense he was wrestling with what he should say.
‘But I do doubt their courage and their wisdom.’ Jiang pushed back his chair a touch, and shifted uneasily.
‘These people know what you want to hear and they shape events and their advice to reflect it. Everything they say is true. But no one can predict the way a wounded beast will react. The authors of this report should have included several possible scenarios in this paper. Including . . . no, especially . . . the worst.’
When Meng replied his voice was cold. ‘My friend, surely you are not afraid to share your wisdom with me. What is the worst scenario we might face?’
‘That the wounded beast will charge.’ Jiang’s words came in a torrent, and his eyes were urgent, pleading. ‘The American president knows she is facing defeat. And she is more dangerous precisely because she is a woman. She knows she will have to work harder than any man to prove she is an effective commander in chief. The combination is lethal. If I were advising her I would feed those insecurities and tell her that she needs to engineer an explosive demonstration of her strength.’
Meng gestured airily at the document as he dismissed Jiang’s critique.
‘That is all in there; you need more time to fully study the paper. She has ordered increased airstrikes in Syria and is sending more military trainers to Ukraine.’
Jiang shook his head.
‘That is meaningless; as the Americans would say, it’s “nickel and dime” stuff. Asta needs a victory. She needs to pick a fight with the biggest kid on the block. And she has already started. She’s trying to blame us for the death of Jackson.’
He leaned forward in his seat.
‘Mr President, we have bluffed the world. It believes we have America’s measure. Or at the very least that America cannot halt our rise. If we move with care we can have everything we want. If we press too hard we risk losing it all.’
Meng waved his arm to silence his colleague.
‘The lecture is over, Mr Jiang.’
His voice rose as he stared hard into the minister’s eyes.
‘America is weak. It has lost its leader and the new president is an untested and uncertain woman. She has neither the will nor the means to challenge us. America will not fight.’
His fist thumped the table, unsettling his tea cup and spilling liquid onto the teak surface.
‘And as you have lost confidence in the mission you once championed you will stay at home while I travel to the South China Sea.’
The president pointed to the door.
‘Go.’
Jiang stood and bowed. As he was leaving, Meng delivered a parting shot.
‘It will be good for you to stay in Beijing. You can spend more time at the theatre with your lovely wife. The two of you seem so happy there in a world of make-believe.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Lake George
It was a long drive into a painful past and an uncertain future.
Harry Dunkley had escaped Sydney three hours earlier, the city’s morning rush giving way to quaint rural settings, roadside diners serving questionable coffee and B-doubles driving too fast and too close. The rhythmic tedium of the highway was a familiar companion.
For the first time in a year he was receiving wages, after Martin Toohey had placed him on his payroll. Last week he’d sorted the paperwork on a loan for a fifteen-year-old Holden Commodore, still going strong after 180,000 clicks.
He had travelled down the Hume Highway, ticking off the kilometres in lots of ten. Just past Goulburn he’d taken the slipway onto the Federal Highway and now, across the flat low grassland of a long-vanished Lake George, an army of wind turbines rose into view, their blades frozen on this breathless autumn day.
A sign signalled Canberra was only fifty kilometres away as ‘Born to Run’ erupted from the Commodore’s speakers. Dunkley thumped the wheel as Springsteen sang about death traps and suicide raps and getting out while you’re young: four-something minutes of rock ’n’ roll bliss.
A nervous energy surged through his body. The long sweep around the dry lake dragged him back to the bittersweet past. Then, he was one of Australia’s elite political journalists, a newshound both feted and feared, one of Murdoch’s Canberra cannons paid to fire at the powerful. It was the thrill of the chase that had got him out of bed each day.
The music switched to the mournful strains of a harmonica and the gentle fingerpicking of a steel-string acoustic guitar. Springsteen’s ‘The River’. Now the Boss was singing about shattered dreams and the carriageway was dragging Dunkley back to memories that haunted him like a curse. At the end of this road was the place where his best friend, Kimberley Gordon, had died. There he had confronted her killer, Charles Dancer. There he had been betrayed by the man he trusted, Brendan Ryan. There he had been dumped by Celia, his girlfriend. There he had lost his job, his money and his dignity.
There, he knew, was a city where the man behind it all reigned as an uncrowned but unchallenged king. A national hero. Sir Jack Webster. Defence chief. Warrior. Fraud. Traitor.
Dunkley pulled into a rest stop, his heart pounding. His hands shook as he lifted them from the wheel.
He killed the engine and got out of the car. A few metres ahead of him the land fell down a rocky hillside to a billiard-table-flat expanse a couple of kilometres wide and a dozen long. The first time he saw this place, in the ’60s, it had looked to his child’s eyes like the sea, as water lapped the point he now stood on and the hills in the distance were so far off they could have been another country. That men had drowned out there now seemed absurd.
A wave of pain washed over Dunkley. He had been played from the moment he’d picked up the black-and-white photo of Bruce Paxton four years ago. They’d known how to reel him in, to make him feel that he had privileged access to a world of dark s
ecrets. They had watched and listened to every move he made and Charles Dancer had prodded him back on course any time he looked like straying.
Kimberley, unwittingly, had been part of their plan – the insider Dunkley trusted who would confirm everything.
Webster’s game had been to destroy Paxton, not because he was a security threat but because he wanted to unpick a multi-billion-dollar defence contract. Worse, the fallen defence minister had dared to question whether Australia should continue to trail in the wake of the United States, and had suggested that it might pay to think differently in a changing world.
When Dunkley uncovered the murky reality of Webster’s shadow government, they’d sacrificed him like the pawn he was. Even having proof of their crimes had been useless. In the information age reality could be dialled up and down by the warlords of the web. The truth was what they decreed it to be.
Who was he kidding, this was a fool’s errand. What made him think he could beat them now? What on earth was he doing? For a moment he contemplated turning around and driving back to Sydney.
Irritably, he arched his back, unknotting muscles unused to driving, then wandered over to read a sign explaining the naming of the rest area. He knew the stops along this part of the Federal Highway were named after Victoria Cross winners and wondered who had given his name to this particular dot on the landscape.
It was Major Peter Badcoe. He had been part of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam. In February 1967 he had engaged in an attack across open ground, in the teeth of machine gun fire, to rescue an American adviser. It was just one of a number of acts of courage by the ‘Galloping Major’, who was killed in April 1967 by a burst of gunfire as he rose to throw a grenade at overwhelmingly stronger opposition.
His valour and leadership were in the highest traditions of the military profession and the Australian Regular Army.
Dunkley reached up to touch the sign; it was warmed by the autumn sunlight.
The only true hero in his battle had been Kimberley. She was meant to help Dunkley nail Paxton, but when she’d found a deeper, more disturbing story, she had not flinched in pursuing it. She’d found the conspirators in the shadow government, and she’d found the real Chinese spy, Catriona Bailey. Nothing was what it seemed.
What hurt Dunkley most, now that his grief for Kimberley was losing its acute edge, was knowing that he had allowed himself to fall into despair. He might have died but for the intervention of Martin Toohey, who’d rescued him from himself, from the police lock-up, and had overseen his rehabilitation at Villa Maria.
Dunkley, the great sceptic, had been saved in the company of a dying order of priests, whose church had been disgraced but whose faith remained undimmed.
He didn’t share their creed but he had rediscovered his faith in humanity and his belief that its abiding genius was its limitless capacity for hope. You could give up hope but it could never be erased from the world. It persisted in every horror. It could survive death.
As Viktor Frankl had testified after the Holocaust, you don’t get to choose what happens to you, but you do get to choose how you respond.
Martin Toohey had offered him hope, given him a job and a reason to live. Now he had a choice.
Dunkley looked up at Major Badcoe’s sign again before walking back to his car. He had made mistakes. But so had they. They hadn’t killed him. Yet.
The first glimpses of Canberra came into view, the thin spire of the Telstra tower and the majestic Brindabellas, as a sign warned him that the maximum speed was one hundred kilometres an hour. He slowed the car but his mind continued to race as he contemplated ringing a mate he’d not heard from in a year or more.
It was closing on midday and the main artery into Canberra was clear of traffic. The national capital was laid out before him in the uniform blandness and well-kept order that he’d once found so appealing, back when his life revolved around prising open the conspiracies of those whose business was keeping secrets.
This time things would be different.
What lay ahead wasn’t everything. But it was all that he had.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Mischief Reef
‘Sir, we will be landing in just over five minutes.’
President Meng glanced at the steward, shifting his gaze momentarily from the seemingly endless kilometres of blue-grey water starting to shimmer in the first wash of pre-dawn light.
The Boeing 747 had been flying for four and a half hours through the dark. For the past hour, two J-11D fighter jets had flanked the presidential plane.
Now they were nearing their destination, the most extraordinary landing strip ever built, a testament to Chinese ingenuity, and the latest and boldest declaration of the nation’s growing confidence.
For two years, an army of labourers had toiled on rolling 24/7 shifts under strict command. The Spratly Islands in the South China Sea were alive with the activity of a budding superpower and Beijing had issued a terse warning to any would-be intruders: stay clear.
The 747 dipped into a mild headwind as the crew prepared to land on a bed of concrete and steel that had transformed this isolated atoll into a fortress.
The landing was perfect, the plane decelerating smoothly before taxiing towards a hangar that had been completed just days earlier.
The captain’s voice came over the intercom.
‘Mr President, welcome to Mischief Reef.’
Pride and exhilaration surged through Meng as he prepared to disembark, but he would be careful to avoid any outward signs of hubris. Today’s ceremony would mark just the start of a critical phase for China.
Not since the liberation of Tibet in 1949 had China been so successful in reclaiming its ancient lands, but even Meng acknowledged, if only to himself, that the expansion was a high-risk play. Beijing faced constant allegations that its ‘creeping invasion’ was the most provocative action by a nation since Germany’s expansion across Europe in the late 1930s.
And Mischief Reef was but one pearl in the necklace being strung across the Pacific. Once it was complete there would be a continuous line of islands enclosing the South China Sea. Each would be declared Chinese territory, with the demand that the rest of the world steer clear of a twelve-mile exclusion zone.
Even while that weak fool Jackson was alive, America had been testing China, sending its warships close to the islands and declaring its right to ‘freedom of navigation through international waters’. It had been a child’s game because the Americans knew there was no military hardware stationed on the sites.
That would end today. This landing would show the world the airstrip was operational. Beside the presidential plane on the tarmac were two warplanes, the first of a squadron that would be in place by year’s end. Missiles would follow on this and every other island.
The president descended a mobile gangway laid with a red carpet that tumbled down to a group of dignitaries flown in for this momentous event. Meng nodded at some and smiled at others as he made his way to a podium to address the workers standing obediently in ranks.
‘Comrades!’ Meng’s voice rang unfortunately thin through the PA. ‘As this day dawns so does a new era in China’s peaceful rise. Through our ingenuity and hard work the Nansha Islands are being transformed, but no one should misunderstand why it is being done.
‘We are not expanding our borders or taking anything that is not rightfully ours.
‘Three thousand years ago, pearls, shells and turtles from these waters were presented as tribute to the rulers of the Zhou Dynasty. Two-thousand-year-old Han Dynasty pottery shards were found on Taiping Island and we have documents showing China was mapping and patrolling these seas when the Roman Empire was nearing its end.
‘The South China Sea has always belonged to our Middle Kingdom. We are just giving form to that reality. We have as much right to build here as we would to construct a new expressway in Beijing.
‘It is our rights that are being challenged, our land that is claimed by other
s.’
Meng swept his hand from left to right.
‘All this is being built to defend our core interests of sovereignty and territorial integrity. And make no mistake, we will defend them.’
He paused, looking at the gathered workers and dignitaries. CCTV, the Chinese national broadcaster, was transmitting his speech live to the world. Right now, in capitals across the globe, world leaders would be in no doubt about the gravity of this moment.
His last sentence had been crafted for their ears.
‘Friends and comrades, here we stand on the first parapet of the Great Sea Wall of China.’
As Meng finished to warm applause, a military band played the opening strains of the national anthem. Several hundred Chinese workers and the VIP guests united in full voice.
Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves,
With our flesh and blood let us build our new Great Wall . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Canberra
. . . the Chinese nation faces its greatest danger
For each one the urgent call for action comes forth.
Jack Webster stared at his 42-inch television screen as the last strains of the Chinese national anthem faded.
It was in Mandarin but Webster was familiar with its meaning. He saw this moment as his own ‘urgent call for action’. It was just after 9.30am in the national capital when the Chinese president concluded his extraordinary address. As the cameras pulled back from the podium, the parting shot was of two brand new J-11D fighter jets parked either side of the presidential plane.
The defence chief knew that the image was aimed directly at the specialist spectators in the worldwide audience. He glanced at a line of clocks on his wall: it was 5.30pm on the US east coast. Heading into the primetime news broadcasts. The Communist leader knew how to pull an audience.
