I pondered the irony of that for a moment. Perhaps it even explained the ease of our escape from Melbourne. But none of it mattered anymore, compared to the sight below us.
‘That man was from Sydney, not from here.’ I waved an arm at Canberra. ‘How did he find out about this?’
‘It was the plane crash.’
I stared. ‘The crash?’
‘I told you. It wasn’t just an accident.’ Harry took a deep breath to calm himself. ‘You remember that night we were lost out in the desert? You remember there were great big thunderstorms way off to the east?’
I nodded, thinking of lightning on a desert horizon.
‘That’s what started it. The controller, he was in charge of the airspace in southern New South Wales that night. He had a plane, a Melbourne to Sydney flight, that was routed right through those storms. The pilots needed a way around, east or west of the bad weather. The problem was, the flight was immediately to the west of Canberra, and the airspace over Canberra has been closed since the bomb. A no-fly zone. So the controller wasn’t allowed to route the flight eastwards. He should have diverted them further west. Only he couldn’t do that either. The airspace to the west was off limits too, that night. Temporarily. For a military emergency.’ Harry glanced at me with a thin smile. ‘That was because of us. The army and the air force had dozens of planes and drones up over western New South Wales that night, looking for you and me and Aisha. They didn’t want commercial aircraft getting in the way.’
A chill ran through me. ‘So what happened?’
‘He sent the plane east. He thought there was just enough room between the storms and the no-fly zone for the plane to squeeze through. But the storms were moving faster than expected, and the plane was forced further off course, and the controller decided that surely it was no problem for just one flight to break the rules, if it was a safety matter. So he vectored them over the city. But suddenly the pilots were telling him something he couldn’t believe. They could see lights below, lots of them. It was Canberra, and it wasn’t a ruin like it was supposed to be.’
‘Ah,’ I said, beginning to understand.
‘No one else heard this. It was just the controller and the aircrew, talking to each other. But a few minutes later the pilots were yelling something about being buzzed by military jets. And a few minutes after that, the pilots were screaming, and the plane vanished from the radar screen.’
I found myself staring down at the airport. The jet that had flown over us had landed, and was taxiing sedately towards the terminal. I could see now that it was no ordinary passenger plane. It was black, and without marking or livery of any kind. But my eyes were drawn to the far side of the airfield. There, amidst huts and hangars, stood a line of steely grey fighter jets.
‘Holy shit,’ I said quietly.
Harry nodded. ‘The plane came down ten k outside the no-fly zone. And the controller ran. He was no fool. This place here—whatever the fuck it is—has been kept secret for a reason. And he knew that if they were prepared to shoot down a plane because the pilots had seen it, then he was on the hit list too.’
The insanity of the whole situation swept over me. ‘But how can Canberra still be here? How could they get away with it? We all saw the mushroom cloud. It was real. So how did they fake it? And why?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked beyond me. ‘Maybe she does.’
I’d forgotten all about Aisha. I turned and saw her there, on her knees against the stone wall, her face starkly white as she stared at the city.
‘Well?’ Harry insisted.
But Aisha didn’t seem to comprehend him. She could only shake her head. ‘It was destroyed. We destroyed it.’
‘Who? Your fucking Southern Jihad?’ Harry was behind her suddenly, his hands around her neck, slamming her body against the wall. ‘Look at it, you stupid bitch! Look at it! Does it look destroyed to you?!’
She was choking, coughing, not even resisting.
‘What the fuck is going on here?!’ Harry screamed.
I dragged him away from her.
Aisha sagged against the wall, gasping. ‘I don’t know,’ she got out. ‘They told me it was us. That we set off the bomb. I thought it was true.’
‘We all thought it was true.’ I still had Harry by the shoulders. ‘She was lied to,’ I told him. ‘Just like we all were.’
The fury went out of him, and I let go.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘What a mess.’
‘What do we do now?’ I asked him. ‘Why did we come here?’
He looked at me blankly. ‘Why? There’s no why. I just had to see it for myself. The bomb was the whole excuse for what’s going on in this country. The state of emergency. The arrests, the detentions. And it never even happened.’
‘So we tell people, right? We get out of here and let everyone know.’
‘Tell who? The Underground? The Underground died back in the ghetto. You saw it. There’s barely anyone left.’
‘Then we tell the media.’
He gave a painful laugh. ‘Three crazies walk into a newspaper office and start raving about Canberra still being in one piece. Oh, that will work.’
‘It might, if one of the crazies is the Prime Minister’s brother. Who’s supposed to have been dead for the last week.’
That made him think, but then he shook his head, rejecting it. ‘Even if we could get to a newspaper, and even if we could make them believe us, it wouldn’t help. The government has security advisers embedded in every single newsroom. They have to clear every story, every investigation. They’d pass the word back to the authorities, and we’d be dead in hours. Us, and half the newspaper staff too.’
‘So you’re sure the government is in on this?’
His look was withering. ‘Are you kidding? The government had to have organised this. There’s no other way it could be done, no other way the secret could’ve been kept. And not just our government. Governments the world over. You can’t hide a whole city just by putting up a fence and a no-fly zone. There’re satellites. American. Russian. Chinese. A whole shitload of people must know that Canberra is still here. And none of them are talking.’
‘But there must be something we can do.’
He searched for an answer, then seemed to give up in despair. He walked back to the wall and gazed down for a time. ‘If only we had a video camera with us. Some way of proving it. But even then, who could we show the footage to? They’d only say we faked it. People aren’t going to throw up their hands and just accept that we’re telling the truth. It’s too insane.’
The sound of more jet engines grew behind us.
We all turned. But when the plane appeared, it sailed over us as serenely as the first one had, descending towards the airport. It was another large passenger jet, but whereas the first one had been black and anonymous, this one was grey, with military markings and national insignia on the tail.
‘That’s not one of ours,’ Harry said, perturbed. ‘That’s the RAF. What the hell are the British doing here?’
We watched the plane land, and then taxi towards the terminal. To our surprise, a convoy of black cars sped out to meet it. Stairs were moved to the aircraft door, and a line of people—just tiny dots at this distance—climbed out of the cars and waited to welcome the descending passengers. A guard of honour.
Harry and I exchanged a glance of complete bewilderment.
‘We have to get down there,’ he said.
‘Shouldn’t we just get away? Before we’re seen?’
‘We can’t just go. We have to find out what’s happening here.’ He pointed to the lower slopes of the hill. ‘Look, we can stay under cover in the scrub almost right to the edge of the airport. We can at least get close enough to see what all these planes are about. And to see who’s on them.’
I stared down, worried. Yes, we could make the airport, but what then? Were we just going to walk into the streets of Canberra and ask the first person we met? Ask them what? Who the fuck were
these people anyway?
‘C’mon,’ Harry said, already moving off.
I looked at Aisha, who was still gazing down bleakly. I felt a momentary stab of pity. Even if she was evil and crazy, I still knew it must hurt to have every belief you’ve ever held proved utterly and concretely wrong.
‘What about you?’ I asked her. ‘You coming too?’
She rose to her feet, bedraggled and dirty. She wiped a slightly bloodied nose, looked at me, and nodded. ‘I want to know who did this,’ she said.
And so we descended the mountain.
THIRTY-THREE
The sun rose as we climbed down. The day was going to be hot, and we were out of water, out of food, and my leg had swollen stiff. I had no idea how we were ever going to make it back to the campervan, all those weary miles away. But nobody seemed to be thinking that far ahead. We were still engrossed by the glimpses of Canberra below us through the trees. It all seemed so normal—the traffic moving in the streets, the distant city noises floating up, the tiny figures of people jogging along the footpaths around the lake. In fact, there was only one thing missing from my memories of an average Canberra morning. No flag was flying from the gigantic pole over Parliament House.
Meanwhile, every ten minutes or so, passenger jets crossed low above us, landing gear down, heading for the airport.
‘It’s a busy fucking strip,’ said Harry, staring up at one of the planes, ‘for a city that isn’t supposed to exist.’
Indeed, it could almost have been a typical morning’s air traffic, back in the times before the bomb, with politicians and bureaucrats commuting in for the day’s business. Except that none of the flights were commercial airliners. They seemed to be mostly military carriers, some of them grey and mysterious, but others with the clear markings of various nationalities. We spotted one that was Chinese, and another that was German. And then there were the two fighter jets that came roaring in to land—returning, I assumed, from a dawn patrol of the Canberra airspace. There was no doubt about their nationality. They belonged to the Royal Australian Air Force. And if I wasn’t mistaken, they were two of our brand-new, only recently delivered, multi-billion-dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Harry. ‘Could the whole city be some sort of military base now?’
He shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t make sense. There’s already a huge base over at Yass. That’s only half an hour away. Why go to all this bother just to create another one?’ He paused, troubled. ‘And yet, obviously the military is involved.’
‘I’m surprised your Underground contacts in the army never said anything.’
‘No, but like I told you, we never penetrated the senior levels.’
‘And no one else in the OU ever got any hint of this?’
‘Not that we understood at the time. But there was one guy, I remember now. He worked in the power industry, a maintenance worker on the New South Wales grid. The OU used him to sabotage power supplies to government installations. But he turned up one day with a story about how the Yass base was using immense amounts of electricity, for its size. He thought that something strange had to be going on there, maybe some kind of military industrial complex we might be interested in. We investigated, but the base seemed perfectly normal. I’m just wondering now if what he saw was actually power being diverted to Canberra. They have to get their electricity from somewhere. It’s another thing about a city you can’t hide.’
‘If only he’d dug a bit deeper,’ I said.
‘He might have,’ Harry replied flatly. ‘He disappeared, shortly afterwards.’
We trudged on, and kangaroos leapt out of our way.
And it’s an ironic thing, interrogators. In the old Canberra, it would have been impossible to walk from Mt Ainslie to the airport without being seen by someone. True, we were safe in the scrub until the foot of the mountain, but between there and the airport, squarely across our path, lay the halls and playing fields of the Australian Royal Military College. Duntroon. In normal times, the very last area we could have hoped to pass through unobserved. The campus would have been swarming with cadet officers. Australia’s finest. Except that now, of course, thanks to you, the college is abandoned, the cadets have long since moved to Sydney, and the native bush has been left to reclaim the grounds. So we were able to creep unmolested past the empty barracks, and arrive at the perimeter of the airfield itself.
And again, interrogators, the very nature of this secret Canberra of yours made it so simple for us. Because when an entire city is fenced off and protected, what need is there of any special security around an airport? Other airfields around the world might be bristling with barbed wire and patrols and cameras—but not Canberra International. The place is virtually unguarded. No one has even bothered to maintain the perimeter fence, and so it took us only moments to find a hole in the wire. From there we hurried a few dozen metres through the long grass, and then a drainage channel, deep and dry, opened at our feet. We dropped down, and waited.
So blame your own secrecy, and your own proud belief that you were completely secure in your hidden city, for the fact that we got in.
And for the disaster which followed.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we’re none the wiser.’
The three of us were peering over the lip of the ditch, studying the scene. Fifty yards or so away were the outlying maintenance buildings and hangars of the terminal complex and, further off, the terminal itself. A few people were visible there, moving about, but for the moment the airport was between arrivals, and there was little else to be seen. We sank back below the rim.
‘There’ll be another plane,’ said Harry.
‘Then what?’
‘We see who gets off it.’
I sat there uneasily, staring up at the sky. I wasn’t happy about this, or with either of my companions. Harry seemed possessed by a reckless curiosity, overriding his native caution, and that wasn’t good. What we were doing was dangerous. As for Aisha, well, she was an unpredictable element at the best of times. She hadn’t spoken since the top of Mt Ainslie, but it was a brooding silence. The reality of Canberra, the lies she had been told—sooner or later, her anger about it all was going to come out. And then who knew what she might do.
But finally a grey airbus thundered over us and landed on the strip. We raised our heads above the ditch again and watched. The plane taxied over towards the terminal. This time, there was no honour guard waiting to greet it. Stairs were rolled up, baggage handlers attended to the cargo hold, and the passengers disembarked without fuss. At a glance, they looked like ordinary civilian men and women—some in suits, others more casually dressed, toting hand luggage—and they filed off into the terminal, for all the world like normal travellers.
The only notable thing about them was that they were all Japanese.
‘So?’ I asked Harry.
‘So . . .’ he replied, chewing his lip in confusion.
We sank back into the ditch.
‘This is all a western conspiracy,’ Aisha suddenly declared. ‘Muslims are being blamed for the destruction of this city, and it never happened.’
Harry stared at her. ‘A few hours ago you were convinced it was Muslims who blew Canberra up. And you were proud of it.’
‘If we really had done it, I would be proud. But it was a lie. A lie told so that Muslims in this country could be locked away in the ghettos.’
Harry considered. ‘I don’t think that all of this was done just as an excuse to put Muslims in detention.’ He thought some more. ‘Anyway, who was it exactly that told you your own people were behind the bombing?’
Aisha adopted her non-cooperative pose and said nothing.
‘C’mon. Whoever it was, they were bullshitting you, so why protect them?’
She frowned at Harry for a moment more, and then her expression dissolved into one of genuine perplexity. ‘There was a man I was introduced to, from another Jihad cell. I never knew his name. He told me he was one of th
e team that smuggled the bomb in. He had proof. He showed me photos of it.’
‘Yeah, well, we all saw the photos. They were made public. They were front bloody page.’
‘No, these weren’t those pictures. The man was in them himself. Standing next to the bomb. They were real. They weren’t copies or fakes.’
‘But there was no bomb.’
‘Who was he then? And what was in the photos?’
‘I don’t fucking know. Obviously he was just some guy who saw the mushroom cloud footage on TV, and thought he’d claim it for himself. So he built a fake bomb and took some photos. So what? It doesn’t prove anything.’
Aisha smiled. ‘My meeting with him was before the bomb went off. Weeks before. He told me it was going to happen. He told all of us. Even the date.’
Harry opened his mouth, then shut it again.
‘Damn it,’ he said eventually, to no one. ‘That’s crazy.’
But at long last, a suspicion was forming in my mind. (And how slow had I been, interrogators? How dense?)
I said, ‘This man Aisha met—what if he was working with the people who arranged the whole charade? What if he was working with the government?’
The two of them looked at me.
‘Think about it,’ I reasoned. ‘We know that the authorities, for some purpose, wanted to fake a nuclear bomb going off here in Canberra. Obviously, they needed someone to blame it on. They needed a terrorist group. So they pick Great Southern Jihad, and they infiltrate one of the cells with a team of double agents. Those agents have photos of themselves with what looks like a bomb, and grand plans, they say, to destroy the capital city. They show the photos around to all their terrorist colleagues, like Aisha. Then, apparently, the bomb goes off as planned. And everyone in Great Southern Jihad thinks, yes, wonderful, it was us who did it.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Aisha uttered.
Underground Page 24
