by Steve Lewis
He was in high spirits.
‘You look like Phillip Adams,’ he told Dunkley, laughing.
‘I feel like a dickhead about to be done for break-and-enter.’
‘Well, you nailed the dress code. Did you bring the camera?’
Dunkley pulled a Canon IXUS from his tracksuit jacket.
‘One hundred and twenty-five bucks from Ted’s.’
‘With thanks to our friends across the road,’ Toohey said, motioning to the Chinese embassy.
The arrival of a pair of white Commonwealth cars interrupted their banter. The late-model Holdens turned into Coronation Drive then pulled up opposite the embassy gates.
Toohey pointed to the lead vehicle. ‘Righto mate, give your mobile to the driver; mine’s going in the other one.’
Dunkley nodded as he handed over his phone. The first COMCAR pulled away, turning left into Commonwealth Avenue, heading towards the lake. The second turned right.
‘If anyone’s tracking us, then for the next few hours we are wherever those cars are,’ Toohey explained.
A horn blast sounded as a well-worn LandCruiser lumbered around the corner and rattled to a stop in front of them. A small woman with brown hair and a cheeky grin jumped from the driver’s seat and bowed theatrically.
‘Your chariot awaits, Mr Toohey.’ She slapped the bonnet. ‘Picked it up today for two grand. Goes well enough, though.’
‘Thanks, Linda, I left your car outside the Hyatt gym.’
They exchanged keys.
‘Hop in, Harry.’
Dunkley fought with a misbehaving seat belt that locked each time he tried to drag it over his shoulder. As he finally coaxed it towards the buckle he noticed a slight tremble in his hands.
His throat was dry as he looked across to Toohey who adjusted his seat before the engine rumbled to life.
Dunkley marvelled at the vagaries of circumstance that had paired them in a crusade against this vicious killer. As the Toyota crunched through the gears the journalist feared they were badly outgunned, boys going to war against a man who had spent his life training for it.
It would be a short drive from the bush capital to the enemy’s stronghold.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
South China Sea
The first warning was issued at 1628 by the Chinese. In English.
‘This is the Chinese navy, this is the Chinese navy. Filipino vessels, you are approaching Chinese sovereign waters. Change course now or we will consider your intentions hostile.’
The BRP Gregorio del Pilar and BRP Ramon Alcaraz were thirty nautical miles west of Mischief Reef.
The Liaoning had used the VHF maritime mobile band, because all vessels monitored its international distress channel.
There was no response. A second warning was issued. Nothing.
Admiral Yu Heng calculated the warships would breach the twelve-nautical-mile zone within thirty minutes. If they crossed that line his orders were explicit: use all necessary force.
The Chinese commander lifted his cap and rubbed his forearm across his brow. The strike group under his command vastly outgunned the Filipino frigates, but opening fire would be an act of war.
He checked his watch again. The Shenyang J-15 fighter jets could intercept the ships in less than ten minutes. There was still time.
He grabbed the microphone from the radio operator.
‘This is Admiral Yu Heng aboard Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning to Philippine navy vessels. Please respond. If you do not change course immediately we will launch action to defend our territory.’
The radio remained silent. Five minutes later, Yu issued an order to deploy two warplanes. They were instructed to fly towards the Filipino ships, but not to fire unless fired upon.
Yu hoped their radar signal alone would be enough to force a Filipino retreat. As he watched the warplanes scream down the flight deck and off the ski-jump bow, he felt a deep foreboding.
The Liaoning’s fatal flaw was that it had no catapult to slingshot its warplanes into the air with a full payload. They could carry heavy weapons or a full fuel tank, but not both.
Minutes later, Yu’s spirits briefly lifted as the VHF band crackled to life.
‘This is Admiral Frank Vinson, commander of the USS George Washington to the Liaoning. We are escorting two Philippine navy vessels in a joint exercise on a peaceful mission through international waters. Recall your planes. If you do not, I will assume we are under attack.’
Yu felt the skin on his scalp tighten. He had sailed into a trap. Frank W Vinson had dropped the flag on Operation Nemesis.
From high above the flight deck, the commander of the USS George Washington watched as the most sophisticated and deadly weaponry ever assembled burst into action from the most dangerous work environment in the world.
The roar from vulture’s row was deafening as jet engines and steam-driven catapults combined to hurl warplanes skywards from zero to 165 miles an hour in two seconds.
First off the deck were two EA-18G Growlers. Built with the DNA of a fighter, the Growler’s trump card was its ability to manipulate the electronic spectrum. Its battlefield was the shadow world of radiation frequencies and it wreaked havoc by firing radio-, infrared- and micro-waves instead of bullets.
The Chinese would be rendered blind, deaf and dumb.
The Growlers were the point guards for the more conventional F/A-18F Super Hornets, surveillance planes and helicopters that would follow in the blackout. This was electronic warfare on afterburners, way beyond anything the Chinese could muster.
Vinson checked his watch.
Within two minutes the Growlers would activate their weapons systems and Yu would lose visibility of the battlespace.
The Chinese pilots would be operating in the dark, unable to even communicate with each other.
The most fateful play in China’s recent history would be in their hands.
If they fired, the US admiral had issued a clear instruction. Shoot them down.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Old Cooma Road
They drove through a tunnel of darkness, the road illuminated by the weak beam of headlights burrowing into the night.
Empty paddocks swept by as they rattled down the winding, narrow road into the sprawling rural parish of Burra. The two men travelled in silence, Toohey focused on the road, Dunkley seeking to draw comfort from the aged vehicle’s familiar rhythm.
The night held an edge. Four years of Dunkley’s life had collapsed into this single encounter with the dark.
What hath night to do with sleep?
The voice in his mind was so clear that Dunkley turned to Toohey with a start.
‘What did you say?’
Toohey glanced at his companion, bemused.
‘Me? Nothing. Too noisy in this rattler to talk.’
The memories came in a vivid torrent. Dunkley was swept back to the streets of Sydney, his mind a blur of booze and despair with fragments of John Milton echoing in his head.
He stared hard at the darkness. Everything in this routine landscape was sinister. A stand of gum trees bleached to death by ringbarking stood as a symbol of man’s casual brutality. Dim moonlight cast demonic shadows on the blighted land.
Dunkley felt panic rising from the pit of his stomach and reaching up to squeeze the air from his lungs. This was a fool’s errand that would destroy them all. He had to fight the urge to scream at Toohey to turn back.
The journalist closed his eyes, took a deep breath and dug past the horrors in his mind to summon a line from Paradise Lost.
‘Long is the way and hard, That out of Hell leads up to light.’
Toohey slowed the vehicle, then pulled to the side of the road, checking their bearings with an old-fashioned map and torch.
‘Not far now, mate, and right on time.’
Two hundred metres on, he turned left into Urila Road and drove for another half a kilometre. Then he stopped the car and killed the engine.
Ahead, a
brightly lit compound shone like a beacon in the darkness, imposing and out of place.
‘Welcome to Fort Webster,’ Toohey muttered.
They were parked about a hundred and fifty metres from a pair of front gates. Beyond them, a row of pencil pines marked a long driveway that led to the residence.
The compound was guarded by a three-metre-high fence made from steel posts set close together like bars in a jail cell. Four CCTV cameras monitored the gates and driveway entrance.
Toohey turned to his friend. ‘Need to stay well out of shot of those, mate.’
Dunkley could see two laser security poles mounted on pillars either side of the gate. Paxton had warned them about the network of invisible light that would sound an alarm if its beam was breached.
Against the high-tech fortifications of this sinister and powerful warlord, Dunkley felt completely inadequate. Worse, he was scared shitless.
‘All right. So what now?’ he asked, trying to mask his fear.
‘We sit tight and wait for reinforcements.’
Ten minutes later the hum of an approaching car broke the silence moments before its headlights lit the narrow bush road.
A white van pulled in behind the LandCruiser. Another black-clad figure clambered out of the passenger-side door.
Bruce Paxton ambled over to Toohey and held out his right hand.
‘Here’s the burner phone you wanted; you owe me fifty bucks.’
Toohey chuckled. ‘I’m good for it.’
‘So where’s the pit?’ Bruce Paxton asked.
‘This way.’
Paxton signalled to the van and two men emerged. They followed Toohey for fifty metres towards the gates. He took a folded sheet of paper and a small torch from his jacket. He checked his bearings and then walked slowly into the long grass by the side of the road. Long minutes passed as he searched before he signalled to the group and pointed his torch at a metal rectangle obscured by a tangle of weeds.
A pair of bolt-cutters sliced through a hardened steel padlock guarding the telecoms hub. The two tradies hefted the cover to one side then poked a torch into the pit. One disappeared into its maw.
‘The back door, Harry,’ Toohey whispered. ‘The ASIO plumbers installed a bypass to the security system so they could get access from outside. Let’s put it to the test.’
Two minutes later, the technician emerged from the pit and gave the thumbs up.
‘Ready to roll when you are.’
Toohey nodded, and a moment later the tiny red lights on top of the security cameras went out and the massive metal gates guarding Webster’s domain smoothly parted.
‘This horror will grow mild, this darkness light,’ Dunkley whispered as he stared into the void.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
South China Sea
A storm of disorienting electromagnetic noise washed through Captain Song Bo’s helmet and the instrument panel on his Shenyang J-15 fighter jet had gone haywire.
The Chinese pilot had lost communications with his ship and his wingman. The two planes were wingtip-to-wingtip and the other pilot’s hand gestures confirmed he was also flying blind.
In the moments before his equipment was scrambled, Song had locked his radar onto the lead Filipino warship. His instruments were now useless, but he gambled that his anti-ship missile’s onboard radar seeker would still find the target.
His orders were clear: to fire, if fired upon. It was obvious he was under attack.
He flicked off the safety switch on his joystick and launched one of his missiles.
The 3M54AE’s cigar-shaped canister dropped from beneath the wing and glided for a few moments. Then the nose-cone fell away and the missile inside was ejected.
The weapon deployed wings and tail controls, its turbo-jet engine engaging as it screamed towards the ocean. It would fly at subsonic speed twenty metres above the water as it homed in on the target. At terminal phase it would kick up to supersonic velocity and skim just five metres above the waves.
Captain Song dipped his wing to watch the weapon’s flame disappear below, then he righted his plane and scanned the horizon.
The Filipino frigate stood no chance.
Major Jennifer Mau yelled out a warning as the red alert of a hostile missile launch flashed in her helmet-mounted cueing system.
‘Ramon Alcaraz, Ramon Alcaraz. Incoming cruise missile closing at subsonic speed. Launch your countermeasures.’
The US Growler pilot engaged her weapons and turned her head until the enemy warplane hit the crosshairs in her visor. Mau locked her radar onto the target, shouting ‘Fox Three’ as she launched an AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile.
The weapon dropped from her port wing. Its rocket engaged, banked right and vanished. The AMRAAM would reach Mach 4 as it closed in on the target.
As the missile blasted from the Growler, its signature was picked up by a Northrop Grumman E-2D Advanced Hawkeye aircraft. The turboprop-driven eyes-in-the-sky was operating at 25,000 feet, the huge grey disc mounted on its back monitoring every inch of the battlespace for the USS George Washington carrier strike group.
In the deadly game of aerial cat and mouse the Hawkeye would ensure the odds were stacked with the hunter. It would transmit targeting data to the US missile, allowing it to manoeuvre in flight as the Chinese J-15 took evasive action. In the missile’s terminal phase the target would be caught in the web of the AMRAAM’s own radar field.
In the wide blue skies above the Pacific, Mau knew there was nowhere the adversary could hide.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Burra
They moved swiftly in the dark, keeping to the fringe of the red gravel drive to muffle the sound of their footfall.
Martin Toohey motioned to his two improbable accomplices to stay locked in close behind him. The driveway, lined with its two neat rows of pencil pines, ran dead straight from the road. A small rise partially obscured the residence, which they estimated was more than one hundred metres inside the fence line.
They reached the top of the rise and stopped. Before them, a vast neo-colonial mansion was illuminated by a bank of security lights trained from every corner. A wide verandah that looked as if it had been ripped from the American deep south wrapped around the building.
An ornate fountain was circled by the driveway and a path led through a sculpted garden before climbing two steps to the columned verandah and a set of imposing double doors. Light streamed through coloured glass panels either side of the grand entrance.
‘How many banks did the fucker have to rob to pay for this?’ growled Bruce Paxton.
‘Just one. The Treasury,’ replied Toohey.
They crouched in semi-darkness just beyond the light cast by the security beams. Thirty metres of open ground lay between them and the verandah. Two late-model BMWs were parked either side of the path.
Toohey turned and whispered, ‘Stay low, stay quiet.’
The three figures scampered from the shadows to the cover of the nearest vehicle.
A waft of classical music from inside the fortress blended with the murmur of the fountain.
Toohey pointed to a pair of floor-to-ceiling windows to the left of the entrance. A ribbon of light was shining through a gap in thick curtains.
‘Thanks to your builder mate, Bruce, we know that must be the “state room”. You two stay put. I’m taking a look.’
He crept towards the verandah, prowling quickly up the steps and dropping to all fours between the windows.
Toohey peeked through one quickly. Then again, this time for longer. He shook his head, scrambled to his feet and hustled back to the other two, fixing them with a broad grin.
‘Well, fellas. The lights are on and everyone’s at home.’
‘What now?’ Paxton inquired.
Toohey reached into his jacket and pulled out the burner phone. He punched in a number he’d scrawled on a slip of paper then looked at his companions.
‘We call in the cavalry.’
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
South China Sea
The warning from the Growler bought vital heartbeats of time.
The crew of the Ramon Alcaraz had been battle-ready for hours, but now counted their lives in seconds.
Moments after Major Mau’s alert, the Filipino warship’s Mark 36 Super Rapid Bloom decoy system started blasting out chaff rounds in a bid to confuse the Chinese missile. Then, when the weapon was just over two kilometres from its target, the warship’s close-in defences locked onto the missile as it kicked up to its terminal speed of Mach 2. The ship’s cannon began automatically firing 25-millimetre projectiles at the rate of two a second. Even at that furious pace, only six rounds could be fired before the missile would strike.
At one thousand metres the missile was on target to blast into the stern, and the crew of the Ramon Alcaraz braced for impact. Then – at five hundred metres – the missile erupted in a thunderous flash.
Shrapnel travelling at twice the speed of sound hailed into the hull and the deck, cutting through steel, glass and flesh.
Fifty kilometres to the north, the two Chinese fighters were banking, jinking and swooping in anticipation of an attack from over the horizon.
Both had engaged their jamming signals, but still couldn’t communicate with each other or their carrier.
First Lieutenant Yang Gan was working through a well-practised drill: pulling hard, left and right; shunting up and down.
It would have been exhilarating if it wasn’t a dance with death.
The pilot saw a flash to his left before he was rocked by the shockwave as Captain Song’s jet disintegrated. Fragments of China’s most advanced naval fighter threw long ribbons of orange and black as they plummeted towards the ocean.
Instinctively, Yang corkscrewed his plane downwards, flattening at fifty metres above the waves before shooting up almost vertically. The bladders in his G-suit inflated, tightening around his muscles, forcing blood into his brain as acceleration and gravity combined to press like a giant boot on his chest.