by Steve Lewis
But in recent months Jiang had begun to urge caution, worried that some of their plans were perhaps too ambitious and risked a regional and internal backlash. He feared they would stumble if they tried to run too fast. Meng dismissed any hesitation, convinced that he was a once in a thousand years leader. To pause was to fail.
‘Jackson is the weakest American president in a century,’ Meng said now. ‘He is our greatest ally. We must continue to act quickly.’
‘Yes sir.’ The minister nodded, but his sullen expression belied his agreement.
Meng had been through this discussion many times and had begun to take note of the points at which his younger confidant would raise carefully worded objections. He motioned to the large map on his wall which displayed China as the hub of the world.
‘We continue to push out in all directions and to bolster our defences,’ he said. ‘But as history teaches, states are destroyed by internal weakness. That is why you, as propaganda minister, are my most important colleague.’
‘Thank you sir, I understand.’ Jiang nodded. ‘The internet poses many challenges as you know. But it also raises many possibilities for keeping watch. We believe that we have all the monitoring and filtering systems we need. All the microblogging sites are covered. We have expanded the web surveillance teams. We have strengthened our control over universities.’
‘All good, but we must not underestimate the value of making regular public examples of those who defy us,’ Meng replied before turning back to the map. ‘How are things progressing in the north and west?’
‘As you know better than me, sir, we are well advanced on developing the New Silk Road from Xi’an,’ – he pointed to central China at the heart of the map – ‘through to Istanbul and then on to Europe.’
He swept his hand down to China’s south.
‘Quanzhou is the port where the Maritime Silk Road begins. It runs through the South China Sea then up through the Malacca Strait to Kolkata in India. It goes on to Nairobi, up around the Horn of Africa, through the Red Sea and into the Mediterranean before linking with the land-based Silk Road in Venice.’
Meng didn’t need to be told the story but he loved encouraging others to extol his visionary policies. He leaned back and held up his arms as if trying to embrace the world.
‘Through two roads, by land and sea, we will link three continents and once again we will be the Middle Kingdom, at the heart of the world of trade, power and culture.’
He turned to his disciple.
‘And we will arrive at our destination much sooner than you ever imagined, my friend.’
Jiang looked at his feet and nodded without making eye contact.
Meng adopted a fatherly tone.
‘You are troubled,’ he said. ‘You know that you can speak freely with me. What is it?’
Jiang looked up, cleared his throat and glanced back at the map.
‘The sea lanes to the south are the key to this,’ he said softly. ‘The South China Sea is ours, but other nations claim those waters. You demonstrated our power brilliantly when you turned back the USS George Washington. That is all we need to press for a negotiated settlement of our claims – to get everything we want without risk.’
‘What are you saying?’ There was a whiff of annoyance in Meng’s tone.
‘Militarising the islands in the South China Sea is courting disaster.’ Jiang’s voice was filled with urgency. ‘We have bluffed the world that we are the equals of America on the high seas, but we know – and the Americans know – that it is not true. There is still a choke point in the Malacca Strait. We still do not have the fleet to sustain a presence in the Indian Ocean. If we overreach in the South China Sea and are defeated then we will be set back years.’
Meng’s eyes were both curious and reproachful.
‘You surprise me, my friend. We were the ones who saw and seized the opportunity to humble the United States.’
He swept his arm across the face of the world.
‘This was our objective.’
Jiang seemed fearful of provoking Meng’s ire; his voice was almost pleading.
‘And we can have it, sir. We have demonstrated our power. Now let’s show our wisdom. The regional players fear us. We can get what we want through diplomacy.’
Meng snorted.
‘I don’t have to seek permission from Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines. They are pissants, all of them. I will take what I want, what is my birthright. The South China Sea project is our Great Sea Wall. The islands will be unsinkable aircraft carriers and resupply ships. Once we have finished terraforming the islands we will claim all the waters around them. The world will have to beg permission to pass.’
Meng’s voice softened, but his tone remained insistent.
‘There is only one power that can challenge us and that is America. But it is ruled by a fool and a coward. Now is the time to act. If we pause we allow the United States time to play itself back into the game.’
The president leaned menacingly close to his minister.
‘The real threat . . . as it ever was . . . is internal weakness. It is your job to guard against that, not to be its mouthpiece.’
Jiang lifted his head, stood to attention and nodded. ‘Yes sir.’
He bowed respectfully and left the room. Only the ticking of an office clock meddled with the president’s thoughts.
Meng re-read the front-page article about the glamorous couple’s night at the opera. Suddenly he lifted the People’s Daily in both hands and tore it in two. He threw the pieces to the floor and picked up his red phone. A female voice answered. ‘Sir?’
‘Send in the cleaners.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Canberra
‘You’re playing Russian roulette with your life, Catriona.’
The doctor unwrapped the blood pressure cuff from Catriona Bailey’s right arm, jotting down a few notes before turning to the opposition leader who sat impassively in her motorised wheelchair.
‘Five empty chambers is a fair bet,’ Bailey said, the defiance in her voice matching the steel-blue coldness of her eyes.
Since emerging from the locked-in syndrome that followed the massive stroke she’d suffered in 2011, she’d engaged a Melbourne specialist to visit her every month. Discreetly. Her recovery after twenty months of hospitalisation had been miraculous, testament to her fierce determination, but she was running on a dangerous cocktail of experimental drugs and unquenchable ambition.
She’d won back the Labor leadership from Martin Toohey before narrowly losing the election to Elizabeth Scott. Now just six seats stood between her and a return to the seductive Treasury benches.
She’d taken credit for the better than expected result and had ruthlessly entrenched her authority. She’d forced a change to the ALP’s rules to ensure her parliamentary leadership could never again be snatched by just fifty-one per cent of the Labor caucus, neutering the faceless power harlots who practised the dark arts of political numerology. They despised her popularity, her power, her autocratic style that spurned their counsel.
But Bailey rode the heady heights of popular opinion. For the past year she’d held a commanding lead over Scott as preferred prime minister, and Labor was ahead in every poll.
She had followed her opponent’s playbook and simply obstructed the work of government. Bailey had never been an idealist, so she had no trouble abandoning policy for pragmatism. Scott might be right about repairing the Budget, ending industry handouts and signing free trade agreements, but Bailey didn’t care. Every debate was reduced to one word: fairness. Every government entreaty met the same answer: no.
Budget cuts were ‘unfair’ because they slashed welfare. Cutting industry handouts was ‘unfair’ because of the loss of subsidised jobs in the economic badlands. Free trade agreements were ‘unfair’ to workers, farmers and protected businesses.
It was a message pounded daily in an endless parade of public and media appearances.
And Bailey’s
rise in popularity was given wings by Scott’s hopeless tenure as she blundered from one prime ministerial disaster to the next.
In her few quiet moments, Bailey would imagine standing on the steps of Government House just after her ministry was sworn in: Catriona 3.0. But they would be a decoration: she would have all the power and wield it ferociously.
The stern tones of her specialist jolted Bailey from yet another lapse in which she found it hard to distinguish reality from drug-induced hallucination.
‘If you don’t take my advice and pace yourself a little more, delegate some responsibilities to your colleagues and cut back on the travel, you may have just months to live. Or you could relapse and end up unable to move or speak again.’
Bailey’s face, gaunt and layered with thick powder, slowly creased in a smile. Her right hand pressed a lever, swinging her wheelchair around. She glided towards the door.
‘If those are my choices then I choose risk and a short full life over a long and empty one,’ she said. ‘I’ll be prime minister next year. I’ll worry about my health after that. Your job is to keep me upright until then.’
The lights of Parliament House sparkled as a gaggle of staffers and reporters boarded the Murrays coach. It was 4.30am and the early morning cool was forecast to give way to a summer scorcher.
It had been like this for more than a year. Every time federal parliament rose, the opposition leader would gather up a handful of colleagues and staff and embark on a blitz of electorates, the media trailing in the wake of the rock star political princess.
Bailey would usually fly to a state capital or regional centre, then board a chartered bus to continue a seemingly never-ending tour of safe and marginal seats alike. It was a perpetual election campaign, and Bailey would swat away claims that the public was tiring of the strategy with the riposte: ‘Look at the polls.’
Today the Bailey Express was going local, leaving from the front of parliament and travelling across the ACT border into Eden–Monaro. The bellwether seat was held by the Liberals with the barest of margins.
Emblazoned with Bailey’s campaign catchphrase ‘Advance Australia Fair’, the coach was primed for a barnstorming three-day tour through this must-win electorate. The reception promised to be good because Labor’s polling showed Bailey was well ahead, from the high plateau of the Monaro to the lush pastures of the South Coast.
At every town, she would spruik from a purpose-built platform alongside the bus. Bailey would doorknock the nation to win back the office stolen from her. Nothing had given her greater satisfaction than dethroning the usurper, Martin Toohey, but his demise had come too close to the election for Bailey to salvage government. Now, with time and a relentless determination, the prize was again within sight.
Her fingers gripped the canister that daily dispensed the cocktail of drugs that kept her functioning. Three pills, three times a day. She swilled them down with a cup of water before easing herself onto her queen-size bed, exhausted but satisfied after another relentless day.
It was 11pm and her touring party was nestled in at the Bega Downs Motor Inn, a modest establishment that offered enough beds for her entourage. There was still work to be done: some finetuning of a speech to be delivered to a local business chamber in the morning, and tinkering with the child care policy she’d been developing for the past four months.
She took a sip of brandy and cupped an iPhone 6 in her left hand. She began typing a message using Confide, the encrypted software app that sent self-destructing digital messages, safe from the many eyes prying online.
Tonight she would continue a conversation using a special code name.
I watch in awe as you go from strength to strength and I know that when I return to power we will do great things.
One minute later, a return message pinged its arrival.
We will.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Melbourne
‘. . . and finally to my beautiful wife, Sabine, without whom I could not have done this . . .’
Brendan Ryan’s voice faltered. His mouth felt dry, but his eyes were glistening. The hard man of the Labor Party despised public displays of emotion, yet here he was in his own theatre of tears.
It was 8pm, a Saturday, and Ryan had just been declared victorious in a by-election for the federal seat of Batman. A narrow strip in Melbourne’s inner north, Batman had returned a Labor member at every election, bar two, since Federation.
But this time the seat had been a battleground between the soft and hard left. Ryan had vociferously deplored the Greens’ rise in this once proud working-class enclave which had ensured that his decision to vacate the Senate for a seat in the House of Representatives had not been all smooth sailing.
Even as he thanked Sabine, his glamorous, brilliant wife, he thought about the hell she’d inadvertently put him through during the campaign. The Liberal Party had run dead, but their dirt unit had played a role in his struggle. It unearthed a series of embarrassing emails sent by Sabine when she’d been working the forex desk for Deutsche.
The emails pointed to a string of complex corporate transactions. They were a decade old, but that hadn’t stopped them finding their way into the hands of an investigative type with the Herald Sun. Despite scant evidence of any wrongdoing, Murdoch’s big-selling tabloid had enjoyed beating up on Sabine.
The paper’s scoops had taken the wind out of Ryan’s campaign, already dented by a lack of rank-and-file branch support for a candidate imposed on Batman by Labor’s federal executive.
In the end, Ryan’s union base had spent enough to ensure victory. He’d secured fifty-one per cent of the two-party preferred vote, scooping up preferences from a motley group of single-issue candidates and micro-parties.
As he stood on this makeshift stage in an uncomfortably warm community hall in Northcote, gazing out at a few dozen fair-weather supporters and a handful of juvenile reporters, an almighty sense of weariness swept over him. For a moment he wondered whether it was all worth it.
Sabine squeezed his hand and whispered a comforting ‘It’s okay, my love’ in his ear. Ryan stiffened and lifted his head. He smiled. Yes, politics was tough but the thrill of victory felt glorious.
Doubt and trepidation gave way to resolve. He’d taken on the worst the Tories could throw at him. He’d touched up the Greens and seen off those grubs who worked for Murdoch and his Melbourne shit sheet.
Canberra beckoned with all its comforts, all its spoils and intrigue. There he would do what he did best, plot and scheme. And he would turn his sights on the real enemy, the Labor leader Catriona Bailey.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Detroit
He knew they were hunting for him.
The counter-snipers scouring the landscape always ran the same playbook: every window, every rooftop with a clear line of sight was a threat.
The advance team had arrived two days before game day. He knew everything they would do: the checklist they would follow; how they would react to real and perceived threats. Twenty-four hours out their number had swelled as they set up a defensive bubble that radiated more than twelve hundred metres from the engagement zone.
By zero hour there would be helicopters in the air and gunmen stationed in the buildings around the target, searching for any signs of trouble through their scopes.
They were setting up a defensive screen for a shot that was rarely fired, an adversary who mostly didn’t exist. They were searching for ghosts.
Multiply their task by a week, by a month, by years – and even the elite would be in danger of losing their edge.
Their complacency was his friend.
Today the danger was real. If they missed him they would live with it for the rest of their lives.
He had been planning this moment for weeks; when it came, it would be measured in heartbeats. Fifteen years of training would collapse into a few seconds and a shot that would reverberate around the world.
The monitor on his wrist showed his heart was bea
ting at seventy. Normal for most, but twenty beats above his resting average.
He breathed in deeply, visualising his opponents’ final preparations: the counter-snipers locking down buildings, starting with the one hundred per cent location, the lair from which even someone of moderate talent could not miss. Then they would fan out until all threats had been eliminated.
He’d chosen the impossible hide, high up and nearly two kilometres from the target, beyond what was considered the effective range of his weapons system. As well, he would be shooting between buildings that would partially obscure his quarry.
Only a handful of snipers could consider this position, and he was one of that handful.
Carefully he unpacked his favourite gun, a hand-made bolt-action British rifle, the Accuracy International PSR. His was a ‘take-down’ version: the barrel and butt could be removed from the rifle with a hex key, halving its size to fit in a rucksack.
He would be shooting .338 Lapua Magnum ammunition with enough power to punch a hole through body armour from one thousand metres. In the current atmospheric conditions, his bullet would slow from supersonic to transonic speed once it passed 1750 metres. That made it less stable, adding another variable to a multitude that he’d had to consider in planning the shot.
The first was gravity. From his eyrie it would take the bullet nearly five seconds to reach the game. His Schmidt & Bender scope had been zeroed to one hundred metres, but at two thousand he was effectively lobbing the bullet, aiming nearly four metres above the target.
Then there was the Coriolis effect. As the bullet left the muzzle of the gun it would be leaving the face of the Earth, the planet rotating under its flight path. Beyond one thousand metres, if you were shooting west, the target would move up and towards you, so bullets frequently missed low. Facing east, targets dropped and moved away, so bullets might miss high.