August 14
“He’s fine,” Norton said. “He’s going to be fine. Not sure he’ll dive again, especially after a stunt like that – a clearance diver should know better than to bolt for the surface, even if he’s only ten metres down. But he’s going to be fine, Matt.”
Norton had given his report. I was prowling around his office, picking up ornaments, fiddling with books, staring at framed photographs on the wall. They were all proud celebrations of alliances. HMAS Canberra in Sydney Harbour on Australia Day. HMAS Canberra at RIMPAC exercises off Hawaii. Commodore Norton welcomes Prince Harry aboard HMAS Canberra. Blah blah blah.
“You can go and visit him if you like.”
“I don’t care about Officer Carrie.”
“Officer Khoury,” Norton said.
“Sorry,” I said. “I mean… I’m glad he’s okay. It’s fine.”
Norton put his pen down. “You don’t look fine. You’re prowling around like a caged tiger.”
I shrugged.
“Sergeant Blake says you’ve been having nightmares.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“If you want to talk to someone, Matt, we have a chaplain.”
“I’m not religious.”
“You could talk to Captain Antonich,” he said. “She’s one of the troops we evacuated from Sydney. Army psychologist.”
“I don’t need a shrink.”
“It’s fine to talk to people, Matt,” Norton said. “It’s not a sign of weakness. I have an appointment with Captain Antonich every few days.”
“Why?”
“It’s helpful to talk,” he said. “We’re all in this together.”
“Oh, bullshit,” I said. “Yeah, let’s get in a drum circle and fucking sing our feelings out. The world’s gone to shit, let’s focus on the positive. Yeah. Fucking great.”
“Matt,” Commodore Norton said, with a touch of ice in his voice. “I have twenty men on this ship who are diving down into that wreck every single day, risking their lives every single day, to turn that state of affairs around. One of them nearly had his femoral artery ripped open two days ago. They’re doing that because of you. You and your brother. Because of what you found. If you want to mope around in a depressive funk all day, that’s your lookout, but the rest of us don’t have to put up with it. Talk to the chaplain, talk to the psych, or suck it up and get on with things. Pick one.”
I was brooding, staring blankly at a photo. Norton shaking hands with some captains from some other Navy, American probably, and where were those allies now?
“Fine,” I said. “Sure.”
I took my notes, went to leave. “Are you at least talking to Aaron about it?” Norton said. “Whatever it is?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Like I said. None of us are in this alone.”
Sure. Aaron has his dream about jumping out of a chopper with a bunch of other soldiers. I don’t recall getting anyone getting dragged into a concrete room with me.
August 15
I got in a fight this evening. I don’t really remember how it started. We were in the mess, the cafeteria, whatever they call it. I was lining up for the daily slop, behind a bunch of survivors – Army survivors, I think, guys from Sydney. One of them pushed in line and I told him to pull back, line up like the rest of us, and they pulled the “chill out mate” routine. I told him to get fucked and it escalated from there. I don’t really remember what happened next, or who threw the first punch. I remember having the upper hand, briefly, before he was on top of me, hand around my wrist to stop me punching him, knee on my chest, hand around my throat, yelling something at me. One of his mates put a boot in my side.
Rahvi was the only person I knew in the mess at the same time. Rahvi was the one who pulled him off me, who decked another soldier when they came at him, who yelled at everybody to back off. Another soldier came at him and Rahvi dodged his punch, laid his own into the guy’s solar plexus, he dropped to the ground. I think that’s what happened – I’d taken a hit to the head, I felt woozy. Don’t fuck with the SAS, I remember thinking, even as a bunch of Army guys piled on Rahvi and then Petty Officer Mack and a bunch of other sailors were dragging us all apart.
I ended up in the brig. That’s what the Navy calls a jail cell – a tiny little room, steel door, toilet, bunk with no mattress or bedding. I don’t know if anybody else got chucked in a cell too.
A few hours later Commodore Norton came down to see me, closing the door behind him and standing with his arms folded. I was lying on the bunk staring at the ceiling, wishing I had a tennis ball to toss against the wall. “Got anything you want to say?” Norton said.
“He jumped the queue,” I said. “It was rude.”
“Uh-huh,” Norton said.
“Is he in the brig?”
“No, Matt, he isn’t, because he’s not the one who picked a fight over nothing.”
“You can’t put me in here,” I said. “I’m a civilian.”
“I can put you wherever I want,” Norton said. “Because the entire country is still under martial law. And this is my ship. And I will not have people brawling over nothing on my ship.”
“So, if they have a good reason, that’s fine?”
Norton stared at me. “Here’s your report for Jagungal for today, Matt: upper hangar deck accessed, zombie clearance in progress. Engine room passage clearance progressing. Petty Officer Khoury released from medical bay. The end. Now, convince me I can trust you to behave normally on my ship and you can send your next dispatch from your cabin instead of the brig.”
He left. Joke’s on him. At least I get this place to myself. The cabin I have to share with the other five dickheads.
August 16
In the morning they shoved some food through the slot in the door, the same gross porridge I would have had up in the mess. I didn’t feel quite as cavalier as I had the previous day about sitting in the brig indefinitely. It was nice not to put up with other people’s snoring for one night, but there was no window in there, and I was starting to feel claustrophobic.
A few hours after breakfast the door was unlocked, and to my surprise it wasn’t Norton or Blake that came in, but Corporal Rahvi. He was dressed in his combat fatigues and had his M4 over his back. He held a pair of bootlaces out to me, which they’d taken away when I’d been put in here – protocol, I guess.
“Good morning to you too,” I said, lacing my boots up. “What, am I getting out of here? Why are you all kitted up?”
“We’re going for a little trip,” Rahvi smiled.
I didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. We left the brig, Rahvi nodding at the sailors on sentry duty, and stayed on the lower levels of the ship. We were headed for the well dock, the hangar for the ship’s various boats, sitting at the stern waterline.
The well dock was busy – there was a group of clearance divers coming in off shift – but I could see a RIB had been prepped for us, and Rickenbacker and Lomax and Dresner were waiting by it, gear prepped and ready to go, rifles slung over their shoulders. Petty Officer Mack was already in the boat, checking over the engine, and he glanced up at me with a greasy look as we entered.
Rahvi gave me a Steyr Aug and a Browning sidearm. I took them without question, holstering the pistol at my right hip and checking the Steyr’s magazine. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“Moreton Island,” Rahvi said. “Beach only. We’re not to approach the treeline.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake…”
“Do you want to go, or not?”
Of course I did. So I shut up.
A few minutes later we were in the RIB, cutting across Moreton Bay, past the pontoon where a few sailors and divers turned to look at us with curiosity. It was a beautiful day, warm but not hot, the western horizon covered with enormous puffy cumulus clouds but the sky above us clear and blue. I’d been in the brig for less than 24 hours, but even from that, it felt nice to be out under the open sky again.
The island was
only a few hundred metres from the Canberra, and it was only a couple of minutes before the hull of the RIB was grinding up onto the western shore, a long stretch of powdery yellow sand. The beaches were wide, and the treeline was a good fifty metres away, a wall of thick green vegetation. There was no sound but the gentle lapping of the waves, the wind in the trees, and the distant shouts and calls from back at the divers’ pontoon near the Canberra, carried out across the water.
For the first time in two weeks, I stepped out onto dry land.
Mack stayed with the boat. The five of us spread out onto the sand, and I found myself immediately drawn towards the treeline – the same place where, just a week ago, I’d first spotted the hidden survivor. Rahvi clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Wasn’t joking, mate,” he said. “Stay near the shore. You go in those trees, there’s no visibility, a zombie could come out the undergrowth and there wouldn’t be a thing you could do about it.”
“So what are we doing here, then?” I said. “What’s the point?”
“A nice walk on the beach,” Rahvi said. Lomax, Dresner and Rickenbacker had already moved further down, drawn towards a rusted shipwreck half-up on the sand like a beached whale.
“No, really,” I said.
“Really. The sarge thinks you’re going stir crazy on the ship. Picking that fight was dumb, Matt…”
“That’s not what it’s about,” I said.
“What’s it about, then?”
I was looking at the treeline. “If we’re going to come here at all we should go into the jungle. That guy’s hiding in there somewhere. He’s not just going to walk out and say hi.”
“That’s not what’s bothering you, though,” Rahvi said. “That’s not why you’re having nightmares. That’s not why you’re getting cabin fever…”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.
Rahvi sighed.
We passed by the shipwreck, a rusted barge from half a century ago laid up on the sand. Dresner and Lomax were poking through the weird scraps and bits of rubbish that had washed up on shore; Rickenbacker had climbed up onto the boat’s rusted hull and was peering back at the distant city with his binoculars. I kept walking on past, wondering how far Rahvi would let us stray from the RIB. It looked like there was a little resort or something a few kilometres further south, a scattering of structures and a little pier.
I looked back at the shipwreck, then back at the treeline. And I saw him. The scavenger, the survivor, the mysterious stranger, standing not twenty metres away from me in the green shadows of the forest. “Hey!” I yelled. There was a sudden flash of movement, and he was gone.
I had my rifle in my hands and I fired a quick burst at the place he’d been, even as I started dashing after him. I don’t know why – I felt a powerful urge to stop him. In a couple of seconds I was in the trees myself, pushing through thick undergrowth dappled with green light from above. Leaves and branches blurred past me. Occasionally I glimpsed movement ahead, someone moving swiftly through the undergrowth. I was already out of breath, lost and disoriented.
I burst out of the trees into a shallow creek, ankle-deep, crystal clear water running over sand. I paused for a moment, panting for breath, still gripping the Steyr in my hands.
He was gone.
Rahvi burst out of the trees behind me a moment later, M4 in his hands and a furious look on his face. “He’s gone,” I said.
“Who fucking cares!” Rahvi hissed. “Downstream, now! Move your ass! Back to the beach! Go!”
He shoved me in the back and I started trotting downstream, splashing through shallow water, glancing over my shoulder and to either side. It was like a green tunnel. Frogs croaked, birds sang, the water gurgled past rocks. Rahvi came behind me, covering our rear, stepping carefully, the butt of his M4 pressed against his shoulder. It wasn’t long before the stream emerged back out at the beach, a little further down from where I’d gone into the trees.
I didn’t speak until we got back out to the beach, regrouped with the privates (who’d apparently been in no mood to plunge into the forest after me) and began heading back to the RIB. “Did you see him?” I asked Rahvi. “Before he ran, when I shouted at him – did you at least see him?”
“Yes, I saw him!” Rahvi said. “What the hell were you thinking Matt? I ordered you not to go into the trees. What’s the first thing you do? You run into the fucking trees!”
“But I saw him!”
“Again: so what? He’s not important, Matt! He’s just some survivor. And I would have thought, after everything you’ve been through, you’d have better survival instincts than that. For all you know he could have been leading you into a trap. And you shot at him? If he wasn’t hostile before, he will be now!”
I didn’t say anything. I felt guilty about shooting at him – I had no idea why I’d done it, something had just come over me. It wasn’t that I thought he was dangerous, exactly, or that I needed to hurt him. I just felt very strongly, on some bone-deep level, that we needed to talk to him, needed to stop him from running, even if it meant putting a bullet in his leg.
I must have missed, anyway. Hadn’t exactly slowed him down.
When we got back to the HMAS Canberra, Blake was even more furious than Rahvi had been. I had to sit through a whole spiel in the wardroom about rashness, recklessness, endangering our entire mission here. But it had been his idea to let me go to the island. I’m not exactly sure what he thought I was going to do.
Lying in my bunk later that night, I thought about it all. There’d been a moment – standing in that stream – when I’d realised how foolish I’d been, how far I was from the Canberra, how cut off I could easily be out there in the jungle. But it hadn’t seemed to matter. Or rather, it hadn’t been as important as chasing the survivor.
It was dangerous to go to the Snowy Mountains, too. It was dangerous to look for the Endeavour. But we had to do it.
August 18
The divers are working deeper into the Abraham Lincoln now. They have a whole thread of various safety lines set up, running through the sunken corridors, so they can easily navigate their way through – like string in a maze. The intel officers in the ops room are slowly putting together a digital recreation of the ship, based on the blueprints the Americans sent us and updated with our own information about what’s ruptured, what’s blocked, what’s full of zombies and what isn’t. They’ve figured out where the warhead armoury is and are accessing it the only way they can – by cutting directly through the deck above, which takes time.
It gives me bad memories of what happened back on the Regina Maersk, when a scavenging crew from Mundrabilla blowtorched their way into a container of ammonium nitrate and blew themselves to bits. That was different, of course. We were civilian survivors, with bolt-action rifles and beanies and haggard beards, blindly chewing into a derelict ship like the scavengers we were. The crew of the HMAS Canberra are professionals, working to military protocols, with all kinds of rules and safety procedures and failsafes.
Still. The idea of cutting into a room which may – hopefully – contain a bunch of a nuclear weapons is unsettling when you’re floating fifty metres above it. I guess I just don’t like the idea of floating around above nukes at all. Never mind the chance one of them goes off – we have no idea what their integrity is like. We might be taking more rems than the Manhattan Project.
Still no sign of the PAL codes. They’ve gained access to the captain’s office but found nothing useful; nothing on the bridge, either. There’s supposed to be a third copy in the ops room but they don’t have access to that yet.
They’ve found all kinds of other stuff, though; there’s a brisk souvenir trade going around the Canberra. Dog tags, sailor’s caps, US Navy branded coffee mugs, all kinds of junk. It feels a bit gross, to me, to be taking dead people’s stuff and using it as stakes in poker games in the wardroom, or showing it off around the cafeteria. The officers don’t seem inclined to discourage it. I guess it doesn’t matter really. God k
nows I’ve looted enough corpses myself this year – though only for stuff I needed, not stuff I just thought was neat.
I guess it’s the thought of all those dead sailors – undead sailors, rather, most of them. Trapped underwater down there, after dying in pretty horrible ways. I’ve wondered plenty of times if any part of you lives on in there, if you can still look out through those milky eyes and see the world. A horrible thought, but if it ever came to it, I’d rather be stumbling about on dry land than entombed in a sunken ship.
August 19
After a rainy few days the sun’s come out again, and half the civilians and non-essential personnel were up on deck today to bask in it. Another cricket game going on; not sure where they’re getting all the balls from, they’ve lost at least a dozen going for six into the bay.
I sat with my legs dangling off the edge of the ship – the officers don’t like that, but there were plenty of people doing it – scanning the trees of Moreton Island with a pair of binoculars. “Doesn’t that get boring?” Rahvi asked me.
“Of course it does,” I said. “Everything’s fucking boring here. But I haven’t been invited to go diving down into the Lincoln for some reason, so…”
“Haven’t seen him again?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe you killed him,” Rahvi said sharply.
I doubted that. I regretted shooting at him – that seemed rash, now – but I’d still seen movement ahead of me when I’d been running through the jungle.
Can’t exactly blame him for not coming back to the treeline, not peering out at us anymore. Still. I feel like I’ve missed something; some lost opportunity; something important.
August 21
2.50am
A burnt orange sunset. Down at ground level, night was already covering the land, but up here the sun’s last rays were still lighting up the puffy cumulus clouds. I was peering out through the cold glass of an airplane window.
Not far away, lurking by the edge of the clouds, the setting sun glinted off the cockpit of a fighter jet. A lethal silhouette, cruising along like a shark.
End Times (Book 4): Destroyer of Worlds Page 17
