by Steve Lewis
On cue, Hadid broke the silence.
‘Something doesn’t fit, Mr Dunkley.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What has Trevor told you?’
Dunkley played dumb. ‘Not much . . . um, can I call you Benny?’
‘Yeah, of course. Well, all I can tell you . . .’ Hadid’s voice trailed off. He was clearly thinking through how much he would say.
Dunkley realised he had to give this nervous tic of a man some assurances.
‘Benny, if it helps, I’ve got no notepad, no tape recorder; I’m not working on a newspaper anymore. I’m doing some research for a former prime minister. I’m not even sure there’s anything here to chase—’
‘Oh, there is something here to chase, Mr Dunkley.’ Hadid’s eyes flashed a glance at Dunkley before darting away.
‘Well then, Benny, perhaps you can tell me what that is? And please, call me Harry.’
Hadid buried his hands in his coat pockets. ‘Air Warfare Destroyer. I presume you’ve heard of the program?’
‘A bit . . . but defence procurement was never my forte,’ said Dunkley. ‘Always reckoned they had too much to spend and didn’t give a rat’s how much they wasted.’
Hadid smiled properly for the first time.
‘The organisation I work for, the Australian National Audit Office, conducted a formal audit of the AWD project throughout 2013, reporting in early 2014. The bottom line was that the $8.5 billion scheme to build three destroyers was well over budget, $302 million to be precise, and climbing. I qualified the audit, refusing to sign off on it.’
Dunkley looked down on the city across the lake, the first flicker of lights appearing as the last fingers of daylight reached over the Brindabellas. It sounded like a pretty boilerplate Defence overrun to him and he hoped he wasn’t going to freeze to death as the bureaucrat relived every line of a multi-volume report.
His companion was getting more agitated as he spoke.
‘That should mean something, Harry. There should be consequences. I was expecting that Defence would be torn apart at a Senate hearing. But no. On the day of the hearing the departmental secretary came with defence chief Jack Webster in tow. I have never seen a performance like it; Webster was charming and staggeringly arrogant by turns. He had every member of the committee fawning over him. They waved his dodgy books through.’
Hadid’s face had become less distinct in the twilight, but that only served to emphasise that he couldn’t keep the rest of his body still. He moved his shoulders and shuffled his feet as he spoke. Dunkley thought that he had rarely seen anyone who looked so uncomfortable in his own skin.
‘So I went back to the books. And conducted one of the most exhaustive audit processes I’ve ever done. I chased every dollar down every sinkhole in that department. I did it all in my own time: early mornings, late nights, every weekend.’
Hadid shuddered to a stop and for the briefest of moments he didn’t move a muscle. He looked up from his feet and stole another glance at Dunkley.
‘Billions!’ His voice squeezed out as a disbelieving rasp.
‘Billions of taxpayers’ dollars are missing, all buried in a procurement project so long, so large and so complex they could be hidden. My final report is almost done. What I believe we are seeing amounts to the biggest fraud in the history of the Commonwealth.’
Dunkley urged Hadid on.
‘Where did the money go?’
‘Most of it was ploughed back into Defence. The entire computer system has been rebuilt. What I don’t understand is why. If it was necessary, they could have asked for the money and they would have got it. But it doesn’t matter why they did it. It’s illegal to procure money for one project and spend it on another. This time heads will roll at Defence.’
Despite his coat, Hadid shivered.
‘And I believe it is worse than that. This time there will be no escape for the sainted Jack Webster. Several million dollars seem to have been siphoned off into an account for which he was the sole signatory. That breaks every rule.’
Dunkley was stunned and for the first time in many a long month he itched to be back in journalism. This was the kind of story he used to dream about, one that deserved a banner headline stretched across all eight broadsheet columns.
‘Benny, if your report is nearly done and you have the authority of the audit office behind you, then publish. That will bring the whole show down.’
Hadid rocked from foot to foot, shrugged his shoulders and pushed his hands deeper into his pockets.
‘I’m only telling you this because I’m not sure that my report will be published. I’ve done all this in secret. Recently I’ve been getting questions from higher up. My boss has been asking what I’ve been up to and I suspect he’s been searching my files.’
Hadid shook his head.
‘But I’ve told no one about this, other than Trevor. Now you. I knew how sensitive it would be and I want all the evidence to be bulletproof before I take it further. I’ve hidden the work deep in our system. How could anyone know about it?’
Dunkley looked out at the lights of Canberra.
‘Believe me, Benny, there are no secrets here. You can’t run and you can’t hide anything from these people.’
The drive back to Canberra’s CBD took barely ten minutes, even in the inexplicably heavy traffic converging on Lady Denman Drive as it swept around the lake.
Dunkley hit a few buttons on his iPhone and waited for an answer, keeping watch for the ACT’s notoriously punctilious traffic cops.
‘Martin, how are you? Dunkley here. Tell me, what do you know about the Air Warfare Destroyer?’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Canberra
The technician loved the room’s blue glow. The ethereal light illuminated the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, its performance measured in floating-point operations. This one crunched through a quadrillion per second. Power beyond belief.
The sealed room hummed as more than a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of circuits kept watch, scooping up the communications signals of millions before distilling them into byte-size packs.
The supercomputer searched the sea of data for keywords that would elevate the watch from machine to man. ‘Malware’, ‘terror’, ‘botnet’, ‘trojan’ and scores of other words would trigger more urgent monitoring as the computer trawled through the communications of every person with a phone or a web connection.
Once a target was in its sights, there was no escape. Every internet search, every tweet, every conversation, every text – all were subjected to surveillance. The nation’s secrets were logged, then distributed to the very few who had a right to know.
Her monitor flashed an amber alert the moment the call was made. An alpha target was on the line, and that demanded her immediate attention.
As he spoke, his words morphed into text on her screen.
Martin, how are you? Dunkley here . . .
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Canberra
An evening symphony of birdsong filtered through the trees, a perfect soundtrack to a Canberra skyline dominated by the four arms of a steel pyramid rising from a small eucalypt forest to the flagpole over Parliament House. It was Black Friday and the bush capital was at its majestic best.
The night would be clear, every star in its place, but Brendan Ryan was deeply troubled.
On the second-floor balcony of his apartment on State Circle, the Labor frontbencher nursed a gin and tonic, stirring the ice cubes, coaxing out the drink’s medicinal balm.
Ryan usually left Canberra before the weekend, but had stayed on after a late afternoon meeting drifted way over schedule. In truth, he was thankful for the chance to reflect; alone, with a bottle of gin far from the demanding din of his constituents.
The weeks had been a blur since he’d won the by-election and been sworn in as the newest member of the House of Representatives. He had abandoned the calm of the Senate to become one of the one hundred and fifty MPs paid to soak up
the complaints of pissant constituents with too much time on their hands.
Most people had little interest in their local member. It was the new puritans who made Ryan’s life a misery. If they weren’t moralising about Labor’s stance on refugees or its free market economic policies or its support for big media and big mining, then they were lodging petitions against sensible roadworks and cafes wanting outdoor seating.
Ryan detested the green-tainted Left, seeing them as a plague of parasites gnawing away at the foundations of Western civilisation. They had perfected the culture of complaint and colonised social media as their own echo chamber.
All his hatreds and fears had coalesced that evening as he’d read a chilling article by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, titled ‘In Defense of Christendom’. Stephens had surveyed Europe and pronounced that its death was in sight.
Ryan picked up a print-out and reread two paragraphs he had highlighted, which warned of Europe’s death through moral incompetence. In a compelling narrative the journalist argued that Europe had swapped its belief in Judaism and Christianity for a raft of ephemeral ideals like ‘tolerance’, ‘openness’ and ‘pleasure’. With its foundations gone, Europeans now wondered why their house was falling apart.
Ryan shuddered and took a long swig of his gin. His beloved Labor Party had been colonised by the same risible ideas and was also dying. The signs had been there for a long time, but few had seen them as early or as clearly as Kim Beazley Snr, when he attacked the Left at a Labor conference in the early 1970s.
‘When I joined the Labor Party, it contained the cream of the working class,’ he had raged. ‘But as I look about me now, all I see are the dregs of the middle class. When will you middle-class perverts stop using the Labor Party as a cultural spittoon?’
‘Fuck the proletariat!’ Ryan offered a mock salute to the working class that had once sustained the Labor Party, but who now were too engaged in the banality of TV reality shows or Facebook videos of cats sneezing to really care. Their apathy allowed the noisy few to dominate.
Ryan still cared deeply about the Labor Party, about his nation and its place in an increasingly dangerous and unpredictable world. He cared about protecting the apathetic masses from online jihadists who were recruiting deep inside suburbia. And he cared about maintaining the trade routes that brought them their modern opiate: cheap flat-screen televisions and Xbox games.
As a senior member of Labor’s frontbench and a key figure on parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, Ryan had received highly confidential briefings about a new terrorist cell signing up would-be jihadists in Melbourne’s outer south-west. The death cult was coming, of that there was no doubt.
He laughed grimly at the irony of it. Finally, with Islamic State, there was a group who rivalled the intellectual Left in its hatred for the West.
But it wasn’t a joke. Hollowed out from within and under attack from without, the defeat of everything that Ryan cherished was in sight. He could not, would not, let it happen. He would go down fighting, even if no one else knew that they were at war.
Intellectual and moral cancer was destroying Europe. America was weak. Beijing was now so emboldened it was militarising islands in the South China Sea and would soon be able to lay claim to all of it. When the sea lanes were closed Australia would learn the true meaning of the tyranny of distance.
So Ryan was fighting in the only way he knew, trying to ensure that Australia could defend itself in its silent, daily battles.
The intelligence and security tentacles of the state needed to be nurtured so they could protect the public. They had to be able to follow the enemy wherever it went, to chase it as it hid in its deep cyber world burrows.
Australia also needed to be able to defend itself in the real world. It needed a strong army and navy and the reach provided by a sophisticated air force. Most of all, the small nation needed a big bully of a friend. America remained the only hope; that was why he was so committed to the Alliance.
‘Jesus.’ Ryan let out a long slow breath.
He roused himself from his melancholy and walked into the kitchen, pouring himself another drink before returning to the balcony. He gazed at the giant flag, hoisted nearly a hundred metres into the sky, that sat proudly above the people’s house.
Tonight it hung limply and he could barely make out the Union Jack that pointed to the nation’s past. It was an echo of the once close bond between Australia and Britain, now little more than a photo album memory.
That’s why the prime minister’s act of political suicide in reinstating the order of knights and dames was so bewildering. It was a throwback to a long-dead age and so out of step with what he knew of Scott’s character. It was a travesty so rare that it had united the spectrum of commentators.
As a Labor MP, Ryan was delighted that Scott was proving so inept. But what added to his long list of troubles was Jack Webster’s decision to accept a knighthood. The Chief of the Defence Force should have known better. ‘Sir Jack’ signalled that he was just like the rest, one of the elite whose first priority was himself.
And Ryan sensed something deeper. Webster was acting and looking more like a politician every day. That worried him. The two had been friends for years, forging deep bonds in their membership of the Alliance. The whole idea of their union was to quietly ensure that Australia and the United States acted as one to defend the Western world. If governments strayed they would act, but their role was to guide, not govern, and to stay below the radar.
The Labor powerbroker looked to the brilliant skies above Canberra as he thought of his own leader, Catriona Bailey. She was the personification of the insurgency.
Ryan was one of the very few who understood the real back story to Bailey: the opposition leader had been recruited by Beijing in the early 1980s and was the glittering prize in the communist regime’s worldwide web of operatives.
The Alliance had tried to remove Bailey, but she’d survived, against the odds, to again take her place at Labor’s helm. Now with the Tory twit heading towards oblivion there was every chance Bailey would be PM sometime next year.
The Liberals could change leaders, but they didn’t have anyone who could beat Bailey.
Ryan knew there was only one man who could ensure a Coalition win, but he was not in parliament. Not yet.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Canberra
The sisterhood was out in droves. The Women in Media luncheon had sold out in record time.
Nearly three hundred of the national capital’s movers and shakers were crammed into the National Press Club to hear what the PR bumpf promised would be a ‘defining speech’.
The group’s patron, Caroline Jones, had flown in to join press gallery heavy-hitters and feminist glitterati for the event, which would be nationally televised. The mood in the auditorium was electric as the club’s chief executive, Maurice Reilly, rose to give his customary pre-address pep talk. Today, he had a special announcement.
‘. . . and in a show of solidarity with Women in Media, the National Press Club board has agreed on a fifty per cent quota for female directors . . .’
The crowd murmured appreciatively and Reilly soaked up the atmosphere before passing the microphone to board member Sophie Morris.
The cameras were rolling and Morris got right into stride. ‘Today’s speaker needs no introduction. He’s someone who enjoys the kind of public adoration any politician would kill for. Would you please join me in welcoming the Chief of the Defence Force, Sir Jack Webster.’
The military man rose, beaming, nodding to Morris before lowering his eyes to quickly scan his typed speech.
‘May I begin by paying my respects to the traditional owners of this land, their elders past and present. May I also thank Women in Media for inviting me to speak.
‘I believe I am the first man ever to do so and that is an honour as great as I have ever enjoyed. I can never hope to fully imagine what it is to be a woman in today’s chaotic, challen
ging world. I was born a man in this comfortable nation of ours, my parents were relatively well off, and I never experienced the institutional discrimination that I’m sure so many of you – here and watching on television – have been subjected to.’
Webster paused, fixing the room with a look of concerned indignation before continuing. ‘When I joined the Royal Australian Air Force I had no idea that I would rise to become the nation’s military chief. Nor did I realise that the military then, as now, had an endemic problem with recognising its inbuilt bias against women, at all levels and in all forms.’
The CDF searched out a familiar figure seated close to the front. ‘I wish to pay particular regard to Sex Discrimination Commissioner Liz Broderick whose counsel I have sought as I have wrestled with the fact that the Australian military really is a blokes’ brigade, something which I am determined to change. My aspiration, my unwavering commitment during my tenure as Chief of the Defence Force, is to achieve gender parity in our military, across all ranks, across all divisions.
‘And might I add that should be a goal for every institution in our great nation.’
The audience, mostly women and overwhelmingly sympathetic, started to stir in appreciation.
‘Of course, that is probably an unattainable state of perfection. But I have set tangible goals, my own gender KPIs if you will, against which I am willing to be judged. Ultimately, though, true and enduring progress in the status and security of women and girls will only be achieved through the collaborative efforts of all women and men.’
Webster was a picture of altruistic integrity. The room was poised, respectful. ‘Today’s military can never fully attain the goal of being truly inclusive until it can ensure that every enlisted woman has the opportunity of rising to the top, and is not fettered by some outdated model based on machismo, but is encouraged and assisted by one that does not discriminate against gender.’
The first hint of applause began in the back-left corner then washed across the room, a wave of reverential recognition that here, in the National Press Club, was a remarkable man seeking to make remarkable changes.