‘Shit,’ said Daphne. ‘What do you want me to do?’
Harry considered briefly. ‘Pull over. It’d look strange otherwise.’
And as we pulled up, I saw that the group of people—they were all male—weren’t just sitting there for the hell of it. They were under the guard of two more men who were brandishing what looked like automatic weapons.
‘Thank Christ you guys came along,’ the man at our window said. He had a bloody nose and an air of panic about him. ‘We’ve got a fucking mess here.’
Harry cast an eye over the scene. ‘What’s the problem?’
The man produced a badge from his back pocket and displayed it a moment, his hand trembling. ‘We’re with Dextron Security, on contract for the Department of Citizenship, escorting this transport of detainees. The fucking truck had a blow-out, and now we got three dozen of these bastards out in the open with only four of us on guard. They’ve already made one run for it.’ He wiped at his injured nose. ‘It got ugly. Fights. Shots in the air. We barely held them back.’
So he was a security officer. A prison guard. And in the back of my mind the question had been hovering—where did all those men sitting in the sand come from? Not from the four-wheel drive. And the truck carried only a shipping container. But then I saw that the doors of the shipping container were split open, and that it was empty now, and then I looked at the thirty-six men again, and understood.
Harry’s tone was hard. ‘We can’t really stop, mate. Army business.’
The officer blinked. ‘Are you kidding? These men are a Grade One flight risk! We’ve radioed in for help, but that’ll be an hour getting here at least. We need you guys right now!’
I watched the back of Harry’s head, appreciating his dilemma. This was the last thing we needed to get mixed up in. But if we were genuine army, there was no way we could have just passed on by. The man would report it.
‘All right,’ Harry said tightly. ‘We’ll give you an hour.’
‘Great,’ the officer said, relieved, and turned back to his own vehicle.
Harry gave me and Aisha a look. ‘Let me or Daphne do all the talking. Just act dumb and do whatever we tell you to do.’
We climbed out into the fading light. The smell of hot metal and burnt oil from the prone truck lingered in the air. We headed over towards the security officer, who was waiting by his four-wheel drive.
He stared at us in renewed astonishment. ‘Don’t you have any guns?’
Harry shook his head. ‘We’re communications, not combat.’
‘Jesus. But you’re still soldiers, right? You know how to shoot, don’t you?’
‘Sure.’
‘Lucky we got spares then.’ He dived into the back of his vehicle, and pulled out more weaponry. Two automatic rifles, and two hand guns. ‘Who wants what?’
Daphne and Harry exchanged glances, then divided the guns between themselves, a pistol and a rifle each.
‘What about those two?’ the man asked, nodding towards me and Aisha.
Daphne shrugged. ‘They’re not rated for these firearms.’ And even coming from a warhorse staff sergeant, it wasn’t a very convincing lie.
‘For fuck’s sake! Who cares? We gotta form a perimeter around those detainees. I don’t give a shit if they’re rated, just give them a weapon.’
Another glance between Harry and Daphne. But what choice did they have? In the end, Aisha and I each got a pistol. And there was no mistaking the look in Harry’s eye as he handed Aisha—terrorist and madwoman—a loaded gun.
‘Right,’ the officer said, leading us over towards the prisoners, ‘We get in a circle, twenty yards out, and if any one of those fuckers makes another run for it, shoot them.’
Harry was staring at the truck. It had obviously been a slow roll-over, because there was no serious damage. ‘You usually carry people in shipping containers?’
‘These days, sure.’
‘Why not a bus?’
‘Too visible. You get a bus full of detainees, anyone can see it. We’ve had ambushes, rescue attempts. Those Underground pricks.’
‘Ah.’
‘So we bung ’em in a container, make sure that the escort vehicles are unmarked, and no one’s the wiser. ’Specially if we stick to the back roads.’
‘Clever,’ said Harry, an odd lilt to his voice.
We spread out. One of the guard detail had remained back on the road to watch for the relief party, which left seven of us to form a circle around the detainees. Guns at the ready. Can you imagine it? Me—an armed soldier, standing guard over dangerous prisoners. Daphne was fine, and Harry too. Even Aisha looked perfectly comfortable with her hand gun. But I felt about as convincing as a kid with a water pistol.
Then there were the prisoners themselves. They’d already tried to escape once, so it seemed, and they were a desperate-looking lot. They weren’t, I finally realised, the normal type of detainees. They weren’t Australian Muslims, or any of the other usual political undesirables from the ghettos. Every single one of them was bearded and Middle Eastern in appearance, and they were muttering to each other in a language I didn’t understand. They were real Arabs.
‘Who are these guys anyway?’ Harry asked the security officer.
‘Illegals. Came in on various boats. We got Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians. From the wars, basically. You’d think these people would have got the message by now.’
‘They been processed yet?’
The man nodded. He was very young. ‘Asylum denied. Suspected terrorist plants. We’re shipping them to the maximum security camp up near Broken Hill.’
‘I see.’
Some of the detainees apparently spoke English and had been following the exchange. ‘We’re not terrorists!’ one of them yelled. ‘We’re refugees!’
‘Shut it,’ snapped the officer, lifting his gun.
The detainee thumped the ground. ‘We’re running away from terrorists! They killed our families! All we want is somewhere to live in peace!’
‘Then you shouldn’t have come here. Now shut up!’
Oh, this wasn’t good. I glanced across at Aisha. Sure enough, I could see her eyes darting from prisoner to prisoner in fury. She was tapping her gun repeatedly against her leg. No, not good at all. Frustration boiled up in me. The security officer was right—what had possessed these people to come to Australia? I sympathised if their homes had been ripped apart by the wars, but everyone knew our borders had long been shut to unauthorised asylum seekers. Muslims in particular. They were bloody idiots—and we’d been caught up in their idiocy.
There were unhappy discussions between the detainees, and some of them were pointing to the horizon, where the sun had almost disappeared.
‘It’s sunset,’ one yelled. ‘We have to pray.’
‘To hell with your goddamn prayer,’ the security officer cursed. ‘Just sit there and don’t move and don’t say another word.’
More angry murmurs.
‘Fuck,’ the officer continued, scanning the horizon nervously. ‘We’ll have full dark in half an hour, and we got no lights. This lot are gonna make another break for it before the relief gets here, I just know it. They’ll cut our fucking throats.’
‘The eight of us are more than enough to keep control,’ Harry said, his voice level and calm. ‘There’s no need for things to get out of hand.’
The man was unconvinced. ‘You didn’t see them twenty minutes ago. Christ, you guys aren’t even real soldiers. Communications, for the love of God!’
He laughed, sounding a little crazed to me—and I wondered if he’d received more than just a bloody nose in the earlier escape attempt. A blow to the head, perhaps.
The murmurs had grown amongst the detainees. Now several of them moved abruptly, rising to their knees and facing to the north-west. A cry went up, wavering and weird in the red evening, the Muslim call to prayer.
‘Hey! Stop that!’ The officer lifted his automatic rifle to his shoulder. ‘Stop that fucking shit right n
ow!’
Harry was saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, let them pray, what harm can it do?’
The men were bowing to the ground now, chanting in their own language, and more of them were following suit. The security officer stomped into their midst, his gun at the ready. ‘I’m giving you a direct order!’
Harry was behind him. ‘This isn’t necessary. Let it go.’
‘I’m in fucking charge here!’ he yelled, without looking at Harry. Lifting a booted foot, he kicked and sent a bowed detainee sprawling in the dust.
Magically, Aisha was at the officer’s side, her gun up against his temple.
‘Let them pray if they want,’ she said, into a sudden dead silence.
‘Oh Jesus,’ Harry breathed.
‘What the fuck?’ The security officer’s face was as red with apoplexy as the sunset. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
‘Aisha,’ Harry said softly, ‘put the gun down.’
‘Let them pray, you dickhead.’
‘Aisha?’ the man echoed, his rifle still aimed squarely at the detainee on the ground. ‘What sort of name is Aisha? Who the hell are you people?’
But the prisoners knew exactly what sort of name Aisha was, and they were all staring at her now in wonderment. And the rest of the security team were in such shock that their guns were still hanging at their sides.
Harry was almost whispering. ‘Aisha. Please.’
For a few seconds longer the tableau held. Who knows what she would have done, if it hadn’t been taken out of her hands. But one of the fool detainees made a sudden grab at the security officer’s automatic. The officer fired in reflex, three rattling shots, and the detainee screamed. Then came another shot, and the officer’s head imploded, his body toppling into the dirt. And standing over him there was Aisha, gazing placidly at the smoke coming from the barrel of her pistol.
Another split second of disbelief all round.
‘Damn,’ I heard Harry sigh.
Then the massacre got under way.
TWENTY
It was my own brother, of course, who passed the law forbidding entry of any Muslims into Australia—and Bernard, too, who declared that all Muslims already resident in the country would have to go into detention camps, or at least be restricted to the designated cultural precincts. In fact, they were two of the first Emergency Acts he passed after the bombing of Canberra.
He’d been in Parliament for twenty-seven years, by then.
And had been Prime Minister for just over one.
But I don’t suppose I really need to detail the final years of his rise. It’s recent history of which even you, interrogators, should be partly aware. After all, Bernard was internationally known long before he became Prime Minister—a key player in the world’s security community, roaming the globe to decry terror. And then there was his great friendship with Nathaniel Harvey, erstwhile Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security, who had since gone on to a state governorship, and then, in 2008, all the way to the US presidency. That was the connection which really put Bernard in the spotlight. He ate, slept and no doubt shat at the White House several times in Nate’s first year—giving my brother the imprimatur of Australian leadership even before his own party elected him.
But once the colossal figure of John Howard had departed the stage, it was inevitable that the Liberals would turn to Bernard sooner or later, especially after Tom Laurel’s disastrous term in between. Okay, Laurel was all smiles and charm, which made a nice change, but he was an empty head in the end, a flash lair the voters didn’t trust. For the worried Liberal Party, Bernard represented a return to the safe old ways of Howard himself. The two men were almost clones. Still, there were many who saw the prime ministership, by the time Bernard was appointed to it in 2009, as something of a poisoned chalice.
It wasn’t a good period for Australia. The economy, after decades of boom, had finally gone stagnant. We’d been dragged into another three messy wars, and the Australian cricket team, after nearly twenty years of unbridled success, had just lost their fourth test series in a row. The mood was in the air that the country had taken a turn for the worse, that the Liberals were moribund, and that after so many years in the wilderness, the Labor Party might be worth a shot again. Bernard, declared the political pundits, was most likely to go down as a caretaker PM who oversaw the end of his party’s long reign.
Instead, as we all know, Canberra was obliterated, the state of emergency was declared and my brother’s transfiguration was upon him.
Actually, it didn’t do Nate Harvey any harm either.
You shouldn’t forget, interrogators, that prior to the bomb, the President’s ratings in the US polls were no better than Bernard’s were here. There’d been all those nasty race riots in the south, and all those mass protests in the northern cities, burning draft cards. It was all very well that the US should be overlord of the world—but was it putting food on American tables? Were the boys ever coming home from the wars? Did the wars serve any purpose anyway? Nate, the last in a long line of Republican hawks, was copping the blame.
The bomb changed all that. President Harvey could point to the ultimate horror—terrorists attacking the west with nukes—to reinforce the call to arms. And so, once again, the tired planet lined up faithfully to continue the fight.
And thus we have the world we have.
And where was I, while my brother soared to the top?
I was sliding towards the abyss.
To tell you the truth, by the day of that cyclone I was probably not long for this world, so deep and black was the hole into which I’d fallen.
But it was a long, slow descent, and it needs explaining. It began, clearly enough, in 2001, when Bernard left the Department of Local Government, and I lost my special access. From then on, even though I was always involved in some project or other, I never prospered. (Like my doomed attempt to get money from that American investor I took to see George Bush. My magic touch was gone.) But it wasn’t just a financial decline. I was getting older, for one thing. A bit fatter, a bit slower, a bit less capable of recovering from the night before. But more than that . . . my spirit was flagging. Deep down, I’d somehow ceased to properly enjoy life.
And it wasn’t just because I was slowly going broke. I’d gone broke before and still enjoyed myself. No, looking back, it was something about the times that was getting to me, something about my surroundings, about Australia in general. John Howard’s Australia, as the newspapers of the day often called it. Which should have been my Australia too. After all, I voted for Howard all the way—even though he bored me rigid—and not just because I wanted Bernard in a position to do me favours. Hell, the Liberals were the party of business and money. Who else would I vote for? I wanted low taxes, I wanted the unions (the bane of my existence, when it came to building resorts) muzzled, I wanted the freedom to run my companies any way I pleased. The Libs promised all that, and delivered on it too. So Howard’s Australia should have been a paradise for me.
Instead, when I looked around at the country, I felt a vague sense of disorientation. Where, to put it one way, had all the fun gone? Yes, we had the war on terror, it was no time for games, but that wasn’t the whole story. We’d fought other wars before without losing our sense of who we were. This was something deeper, something that was missing from the character of the place. Where was all that irreverent energy that we’d once been famous for? Where was the vitality, the fuck-it-all brashness, the she’ll-be-right flair? That was my Australia, the Australia of the seventies and the eighties. Not sophisticated, perhaps, and maybe not even really grown up. But at least the place was alive. Everywhere you looked—no matter what aspect of society, left, right, rich, poor—you saw people acting with gusto. Rudely, crassly, violently . . . but with colour.
You only have to consider what sort of Prime Ministers we had in the seventies and eighties. Now they were identities. Gough Whitlam—so enraptured and radical that he outraged half the nation to the point of civil
uprising, and moved the other half to a fervour of worship so profound they deify him to this day. And Malcom Fraser, the man who toppled him—conspiring to freeze Parliament and then plotting with the Governor-General to depose his rival, the greatest constitutional crisis of the century. The nerve that took. The cunning. And then Bob Hawke, a raucous cockatoo of a man, a squawking dwarf with charisma to burn—and anyway, how could you not love a PM who once held the world record for downing a yard glass of beer? And then, finally, Paul Keating, the arch manipulator, an oily, stylish, backroom brawler dressed in designer suits, with a mouth that was both patrician and straight from the sewer. A man who was capable of the sneering remark that his own country was ‘the arse-end of the world’. And meaning it.
Oh, yes. Liars, cheats and swindlers, every one of them, but they had personality, and none of them were afraid of anything, at home or abroad. The country they led seemed to be the same. Loud and boastful and too full of itself by half, but getting the joke, too; more than happy to take the piss out of itself, if need be. That’s the country I remember living in. Okay, I’m looking through rose-tinted glasses, and I know it was far from perfect, but somehow during the 1990s everything changed. That breezy sense of confidence and of openness and of progress forward . . . it faded away.
I’m buggered if I know who or what to blame exactly. Certainly our political leaders—if not actually the cause of it—were at least symptoms. Take the dreary John Howard and his protégé, my brother. I ask you—can you imagine either of them (or Tom Laurel, for that matter) getting anywhere near the PM’s office back in the wild old days? Whitlam would have roared his disgust. Fraser would have refused to dirty his hands with them. Hawke would have shrieked with laughter at the very idea. And Keating? Ah well, Keating was there to see Howard beat him fair and square, and so learnt the bitter truth—we preferred the bean counters to the visionaries. Lawyers and accountants, that’s who we handed the country to.
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