Underground

by Andrew McGahan

  UNDERGROUND

  Also by Andrew McGahan

  Praise

  1988

  Last Drinks

  The White Earth

  ANDREW

  McGAHAN

  UNDERGROUND

  This is a work of fiction.

  Nothing in it is meant to be taken as fact.

  This edition published in 2007

  First published in 2006

  Copyright © Andrew McGahan 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or

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  publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a

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  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  McGahan, Andrew.

  Underground.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 330 1 (pbk.).

  1. Terrorism - Australia - Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  Set in 12.5/15 pt Granjon by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Its name was Yusuf.

  Probably a joke by someone in the Department of Meteorology. Or maybe that’s just official policy now. A state of emergency decree from the government. If something looks big and dangerous, then find a means to link it to Islam.

  Either way, it was surely the biggest cyclone to hit that part of the Queensland coast in decades—a great-granddaddy of a tropical storm. Category five. Winds gusting over two hundred and ninety k; walls of horizontal rain, like Allah himself was pissing in your face; and a storm surge that had lifted the Pacific Ocean by twenty murderous feet or more.

  I was right there in the middle of it all. Six storeys up, my belly on the tiles and one arm wrapped around the balcony railing, hanging on for dear life as I peered over the edge, nearly deafened by the unearthly shriek of the wind. My face stinging. My slotted eyes agonised. The rest of me drenched. With a whisky glass clutched in my free hand, holding more sea water now than alcohol.

  Below me, three years of work was being steadily destroyed. The artificial beach had been the first to go. Huge waves loomed there now, their crests torn into a brown froth that streaked ahead wildly. I couldn’t even tell where the beach had been anymore. Hundreds of dump trucks had emptied thousands of tonnes of white sand down there (it cost a fortune) but now it was all just part of the raging ocean.

  Even drunk and half-terrified as I was, I could appreciate the irony. Leave the mangroves alone, the environmentalists had said. Leave the dunes behind them alone. They had protested and petitioned and chained themselves to bulldozers—and gone to prison for their troubles. But what did I or my investors care? We wanted a pristine beach for the punters, not mudflats. We wanted open ocean views from the rooms, not the backs of old dunes covered with scrub. So I’d let the construction company loose to rip out the mangroves and level the frontage.

  Three years later, the environmentalists were all long gone, no doubt locked up for good these days, but Yusuf was teaching me a lesson. The storm surge had drowned most of the resort. The beach and, behind that, the lawns and gardens and pathways that led to it. Wreckage floated everywhere. The four-acre pool was underwater, with its cabanas and bars, as were the tennis courts, the croquet pitch, and, from what I could see, a fair percentage of the championship links golf course. But what was truly awesome was that the great muddy waves were rolling clear over the lot of it, two hundred metres or more from the normal coastline, and slamming like thunder into the resort’s main buildings.

  Up in one of the penthouse suites, I could feel the hotel wing shake with every watery detonation, solid concrete or not. From the floors below came the sloshing din of shattered glass and broken furniture rolling about. And squinting into the storm I could see that the other buildings were faring worse. The luxury villas, off in their private gardens, were inundated up to the gutters. The restaurant/reception centre was roofless, a mass of papers and tablecloths and curtains, whipping away into the wind. And the great big block of the two-thousand-seat convention centre was crumbling with each wave, like a sandstone cliff collapsing into the sea, filmed on video over millennia and set at furious fast-forward.

  ‘Come on,’ I yelled at the sky. ‘COME ON!’

  I was enjoying myself, actually.

  In fact, the cyclone was doing me the biggest favour possible. That is, the cyclone, and an insurance policy that was a good month yet from lapsing. Because, to be frank, the Ocean Sands Green Resort was the white elephant of all white elephants. Despite all the money we’d spent, despite all the work we’d done, the place had never opened to the public. And it never would have, storm or no storm. World events had put paid to any hope of that. So I, managing supervisor and public face of the project, was free to cheer and sob and laugh myself sick as it dissolved away like a sandcastle.

  The cyclone whooped and sobbed and laughed along too.

  It was time for another drink.

  I let go of the handrail and allowed the wind to drive me back through the shattered glass doors into the suite proper. I was bleeding from that glass, and from other flying debris, but none of the cuts were serious. Indeed, I felt invulnerable. And why not? God knows how much scotch I’d tossed down or how many grams of dodgy cocaine I’d snorted by that stage. I crawled about the room, a jumble of overturned chairs and empty bottles and filthy plates and torn bed sheets, praying there was still some alcohol surviving somewhere.

  Of course, the room had been like that even before the cyclone hit. Julie and I had been living it up hard. For the resort had actually welcomed two guests before its untimely demise. Me, and my assistant publicist, Julie Favmore—twenty-eight years old, cunning as the devil, and horny as all hell. The pair of us had set ourselves up in one of the suites—indeed, the only one that had been properly fitted out, for display purposes, before financial reality sank in and construction ceased. All that time and effort deserved at least one party, I’d decided.

  And what a time we had, with the whole place to ourselves. Oh, Julie . . . I wonder where you are now? My old balls are still aching from the things you did to them. It was less than a month ago, after all. And yet you were the very last fuck of my life, it looks likely.

  But Julie was long gone by the time the storm really got going. She cleared out as soon as the first warnings came. She was a sensible local lass, for all her sexual depravity, and had seen cyclones before. So I was alone. True, there was a security team on station at the main gate, but they were under strict instructions to let no one else in and, more importantly, not to disturb me. No doubt I should have hauled out of there too, but I was hardly the man to let a mere storm get in the way of a promisin
g bender. Besides, my career was in the toilet once again and, an empty resort aside, I had absolutely nowhere else to go.

  Anyway, I found a bottle at last, then sat spreadeagled on the wet marble floor, grinned at the fury out there on the ocean, and drank.

  The next thing I knew, everything got quiet. The wind, the noise, the rain—in just a minute or two, it all faded away.

  ‘Ah!’ said I.

  I’d been hoping for this. It’s not every day that you get to see the eye of a cyclone. I lurched to my feet and went back to the balcony to look.

  Now I’ve heard that sometimes in the eye of storms people have seen clear blue skies. I didn’t. There were still clouds above. But they weren’t like any clouds I’d seen before—they were a creeping, glowing grey. And they capped a gigantic bowl of warm, faintly misty air, drifting between towering walls of cloud that curved off into blackness. Five miles across, ten, it was impossible to gauge distances. So vast and calm, and yet the atmosphere thrummed with an electric sense of threat. And while there was no rain or wind, the ocean was still sending breakers across my resort—their sand-stained crests glassy now, and all the more ominous for it—and shuddering booms still quaked through the building.

  It felt like the end of the world, and I don’t know how long I stood there, gazing up. But finally a new sound grabbed my attention. It was the crack and splash of something large falling into the water. I peered down over the railing. Several storeys below, the balconies of the lower floors were breaking away from the building and toppling into the sea.

  Through the drunkenness and the hum of chemicals, some alarms finally sounded. It was time to get out of there. I was more than happy for the hotel to collapse, but not with me in it. I looked up. The walls of Yusuf’s eye reared in every direction, almost unmoving at a glance, and yet swirling with the slow hypnotism of ferocious speed, seen from far away. Or maybe not so far away. But a carelessness still possessed me. As if I had all the time in the world, I hunted out the bottle again, then reeled off lazily through the bare hallways.

  Moisture dripped everywhere, and awful echoes rang up and down the stairs. I descended to the first floor and found it awash up to my knees—and this was still a good fifteen feet above ground level. I paused to open a door that led to a seaward-facing suite. It was a horrible sight, like gazing out from the back of a cave, a tangle of broken concrete and glass, and only the ocean beyond. Even worse, a monster was rolling across the water towards me. From above, each wave had looked big, but now, from sea level, I saw an evil, dirty-brown wall. The water in the room receded to meet it, and in horror I slammed the door. An explosion seemed to erupt behind it, and water jetted through the cracks like twenty fire hoses.

  I staggered away to the other side of the hall and entered a suite on the leeward side of the building. Here, there was much less damage. I waded to the balcony. These would have been the cheaper rooms, for instead of facing the ocean they faced the low coastal hills. Staring out now, I could see that the front car park and landscaping were drowned deep, but perhaps less than one hundred yards away rose a muddy hillside of storm-ravaged scrub and trees. Dry land.

  Truth to tell, I hadn’t given much thought to my escape, until then. I’d probably assumed that I would be driving to safety. But my Mercedes was somewhere down in that car park, or sailing halfway to Tahiti by now. I would have to swim. I considered the water—it was relatively calm, here in the lee of the hotel—but it still had a malignant look, with all sorts of debris tossing in greasy undulations. I swigged from the bottle, mustering my resolve, but then the water in the room surged and lifted, and I didn’t so much jump off the balcony as float off it. The bottle was gone from my hand and I was swimming.

  I am not a fit man, even for a fifty-nine year old. But fat, they say, makes you buoyant, and I have plenty of that. And while there were probably all sorts of treacherous currents and vortexes in the water, somehow I avoided them all. I do have one memory of staring down into the murky depths and seeing a golf cart tumbling beneath me. But then there was something solid under my feet. Not mud, but bitumen. And thus I waded, completely unharmed, out of the cyclone’s deadly ocean, and onto the resort driveway.

  I was laughing. Nothing was going to kill me today. I knew that half a kilometre along the driveway was the front gate, and the security complex, built as solidly as a bunker. I could ride out the storm there. Maybe, if the guards had any sense, there would even be something to drink. I consulted the sky. The walls of the cyclone loomed with their surreal fixity, and a haze covered the sea—but somewhere out there the other side of the eye was rushing towards me. I took one last look at my resort, the final folly of an age when things like holidays and tourism had seemed to matter. Then I nodded farewell, and turned to the road.

  And saw the most unlikely sight of all, on that insane day. A bright red Australia Post van was grumbling down the hill.

  Was I hallucinating? There was certainly enough alcohol and cocaine in my system. But no, the vehicle was real enough, a jarringly everyday sight amidst all the chaos. My first thought was—so what were the security guards doing? How had the van got through the gates? The lazy bastards must be hiding away in the office. My second, and far more rational, thought was—what the fuck was the van doing out in a storm like this anyway? The dedication of the postal service was one thing—but no mail was that important.

  And yet, why the hell not?

  Nothing could surprise me anymore.

  The van halted in front of me, and two postmen climbed out. Bizarrely, they seemed to take no note of the sky, or the sight of the swollen ocean consuming a resort. Their eyes, under their caps, were fixed steadfastly and seriously upon me, as if we’d arranged this very meeting, long ago. One of them held a package about the size of a shoebox.

  ‘Mr Leo James?’ the man with the package asked.

  ‘That’s me.’ Could they possibly be for real? Of course it was me, and I doubted there were many people in Australia who wouldn’t know that. The craziness of it all was overpowering. I even found myself giving a little bow.

  Neither one responded, or smiled.

  They were odd looking posties, I decided. Their uniforms were untidy, somehow. Ill-fitting. And then I noticed that the package was lying empty on the road, a soggy heap, and instead, the first man was holding a gun.

  ‘Get in the van, please,’ he said.

  I stared. Since when did postmen carry weapons? Was this another state of emergency decree? (I mean, who can keep track of them all?) But in any case, why on earth was he pointing it at me? And from behind now I could hear a sound above the boom of the waves—a rushing and howling that could only be one thing. The armed mailman blinked, a fraction of his weird calm draining away. He was facing the ocean, of course, and could see what was coming.

  ‘In the van,’ he repeated. ‘Now.’

  I gawped at him. And a sudden breeze tugged urgently at my back.

  ‘I will shoot you,’ he stated.

  Abruptly the wind was there again, a savage gust of it that made me stagger forward to my knees. Something silver flickered past my eyes, moving so fast it was only a blur, and at the same moment the air was full of noise and water again.

  But I was staring at the postie. I’d never seen a man decapitated before—well, not right in front of me, anyway. But that’s cyclones for you. Nothing is more dangerous in high winds than a loose sheet of tin.

  The other mailman was gawping now. His colleague’s headless body took a few odd steps against the wind, and then fell over.

  ‘Ha!’ I cried above the cyclone. ‘Fuck you, prick!’

  Nothing was going to kill me today.

  Then the back doors of the van popped open, and two more men jumped out, and these guys hadn’t even bothered with the pretend uniforms. Together, the three of them set to and proceeded to beat the shit out of me. After which they threw me in the back of the van. But I suppose I can’t blame them for panicking a bit. One of them was dead, and
that cyclone really was a scary thing, even if it turned out to be on their side.

  TWO

  But no, on second thought, that isn’t going far enough back. My troubles began long before the cyclone. I’ll have to start this again.

  For that matter, why am I even bothering to write this down? I know perfectly well that it will never be read by anyone. Except, that is, by you, my dear interrogators. You, and maybe a few of your superiors. That’s not much of an audience. And besides, it’s not as if you people need to hear all of this over. You’ve already made me tell you everything. Admit to everything. Confess to everything.

  So why?

  Well, because here I sit, at this big, empty table, locked away in this giant, empty room, with nothing else to do. And despite the fear and the anger, and the occasional pain, I’m also, mostly, just very bored. No proper books in here, no TV, nothing to pass the hours between our little talks. Nothing to do but wait, and worry, and stare at my surroundings.

  I’m getting very sick of the colour green.

  Green leather, green carpet, green walls.

  Everywhere I look.

  So to occupy myself I’ve decided to commence my memoirs. One thing I do have is plenty of wastepaper and pens. The previous occupants very thoughtfully left them behind. And it seems, too, that I have the time . . . maybe even enough to get this finished, before the inevitable comes to pass.

  But how far back should I start? I could go back years and years, no doubt. My current fate, after all, is linked to a much wider history. I could go all the way back, ten years and more, to September 11 and the Twin Towers. (And who’d have ever thought that we’d reflect on that particular day as a happier, saner, safer time?) Truth is, I could go back even further than that. But I won’t. I’ll go back just over two years. I’ll start with the dreadful events in Canberra.