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Underground

Page 13

by Andrew McGahan


  Prophetic words, as it happened.

  Sadly, the day itself turned out to be a waste of my time, because my American friend decided not to invest with me after all. Still, it was something to see the President in person, if only from up in the gallery. Moreover, events would reveal that I hadn’t merely seen a US president that day—I’d actually shaken hands with one. And by the time Nathaniel Harvey had risen to the highest office in America, who would be holding the highest office in Australia other than his bosom buddy, my own little baby brother.

  EIGHTEEN

  A hangover was kicking in as we made for the Queensland–New South Wales border. Not a proper hangover, I hadn’t drunk nearly enough at the cricket for that. This was more a slow and unpleasant sobering up. The creeping return—after all the fuss at the Gabba, and the frantic rush out of there—to the cold realities of life on the run. Another false identity, and another secret journey to who knew where.

  We were riding through the night in a battered old Humvee. It was the property of the Australian Army, and it wasn’t like any of the luxury Hummers I’ve ridden in over the years. This was no hotel room on wheels—this was the basic military model, as stark and simple as you can get. And hard on the backbone. But then we were soldiers now, not soft civilians, Aisha, Harry and I—all of us dressed up in fatigues, and each bearing the distinguished rank of corporal.

  Our cover story was that we were a team of communications experts, setting out to tour satellite facilities in regional areas. To that end, we not only had new IDs in our pockets, we also had military transit passes that were good to take us through any roadblock we might encounter in the next thousand kilometres. We would never have got out of Brisbane without them. The explosion at the cricket had sent the whole city into lock down. But there we were, already clear of the outer suburbs and heading south-west on the Cunningham Highway.

  I was in the back, with Aisha. She’d scrubbed off the ludicrous make-up of her previous disguise, and dumped the jewellery, but with her styled hair and pale skin and narrow face, she made an unlikely soldier. Not that I was any better—a fat fifty-nine year old with not an ounce of muscle on me. Harry, up front, at least looked the part. But only the fourth member of our group, the driver, was genuine—a shaven-headed, gravel-voiced warhorse of a staff sergeant whose first name, Daphne, gave a rare clue that she was, in fact, a woman.

  ‘A bomb,’ Harry was still muttering, shaking his head and turning around repeatedly to glare at Aisha. ‘A fucking bomb.’

  It wasn’t the bomb itself that bothered him—it was that Aisha had known about it. Harry was regarding her with a whole new air of puzzlement and worry now. So was I. Ever since the detonation, she’d had a look of creamy satisfaction on her face, a sort of distant smile that seemed, to me at least (sex-starved old fart that I am), almost post-coital. It was downright sinister. And a timely reminder about who she really was—a terrorist, sworn to violence, mad, and kind of beautiful, but above all else, highly dangerous. And important. Both to the authorities who wanted her dead, and to people like Harry who were trying to keep her alive.

  ‘Woman,’ he warned, ‘when the high command get hold of you, they’re gonna grill your arse. You know a lot more than you’re telling.’

  Aisha merely considered him with languid contempt.

  I said to her, ‘Just for interest’s sake, are there any more bombs we should know about? I’d prefer to avoid them, if possible.’

  ‘There will always be bombs. Until we win.’

  ‘Win what exactly?’

  ‘A united world of Islam.’

  ‘And then what? Are you going to put on that veil thing and become a good Muslim wife to some man and never show your face in public?’

  A smouldering glance. ‘A united world of new Islam.’

  ‘There you go again,’ said Harry. ‘And I’d love to know where you’re getting it from. None of your terrorist buddies are talking about a new Islam. They seem pretty damn stuck on the old Islam. And they like things like the veil.’

  ‘Western propaganda.’

  ‘Who are your mullahs, then? Where do they come from? The Middle East? Indonesia?’

  ‘My teachers weren’t Arabs. Or Indonesians. They were white Australians.’

  ‘Like who?’

  But Aisha was done with the conversation.

  ‘Well, screw you too,’ Harry said, and gave up.

  We rode in silence for a mile or so. Then Aisha spoke, softly. ‘There are no more bombs that I know of. At least, not where we’re going.’

  I followed her eyes to watch the highway rolling underneath the headlights, the night darkness all around. Where were we going? South, that was all we’d been told. Somewhere south, where the leaders of the Oz Underground were waiting for us, whoever they were. Then I found myself staring about at the interior of the Humvee, dully lit from the dashboard. I was sitting, in effect, in the very heart of the beast—the bosom of an army that was now my enemy—and yet I was safe. And the implications of that were only just starting to hit me.

  ‘How on earth did the OU pull this off?’ I asked Harry. ‘How can the Australian Army be part of the resistance?’

  He turned to look back at me. ‘Not all of the army, just some of it.’

  Our driver stirred. ‘Those of us with any fucking balls, anyway.’

  I said, ‘But the military should love this government. Army, air force, navy—they’ve never been bigger or more powerful or better funded.’

  The woman gave a snort. ‘Size ain’t everything, darlin’.’

  Harry smiled. ‘Daphne here is regular army.’

  ‘Thirty years coming up next month. When I joined we had maybe sixty thousand personnel in the whole Defence Force. Small, but bloody professional.’

  ‘Now look what we have,’ said Harry. ‘Over three hundred thousand personnel, but most of those conscripted, and next to useless. They’re spread thin, too, with all these wars we’re fighting, not to mention home security. The truth is the ADF is being run ragged, and morale is at rock bottom.’

  The sergeant gave me a glance in the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ve got mates overseas, and what I hear isn’t good. It’s the same old shit. Wars we can’t win. Peacekeeping where everyone hates our guts. The troops mostly strung out on drugs or booze. Whole companies refusing orders. Officers beaten up or shot in the back or just told to fuck off. Discipline’s a joke.’

  Harry was nodding. ‘Then there’s the ideological aspect. The Australian military used to be completely apolitical. These days, though, if you aren’t a vocal supporter of government policy, then you don’t go up the chain of promotion.’

  ‘Thirty fucking years served,’ repeated Daphne, ‘with distinction. I was in the first two Gulf wars. Then some secret service queer in a suit sits me down and says I have to take a loyalty test. Or else. Stick it up your arse, I said.’

  ‘She’s not alone,’ Harry added. ‘The military have been in on the Underground pretty much from the start. The navy was first. That whole asylum seekers scare, the boat people, back in the Howard days—the navy really didn’t like what they were made to do. They’re sailors, and sailors have rules. You don’t ignore people in a sinking boat. You don’t fire warning shots at them. You don’t have debates about whether to save swimmers in the water. You sure as hell don’t wait until you get approval from Canberra before you send in a rescue party. Those guys all know that one day they might be the ones in the drink . . . And they’ll expect someone to help, not tell them they’re breaching an immigration zone.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ Daphne declared. ‘The things I saw in Iraq, second time around, no one in Australia would believe. It was like every fucking thief and liar in the world descended on that poor bloody country and ate the place alive.’

  ‘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.

  NINETEEN

  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.

 

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