The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  Anna wasn’t listening. She was staring at the blank back of the Australian coat of arms silhouetted against the sky and the lake. She walked over to examine it more closely and that was where she found what they were looking for.

  At first she didn’t believe what she was seeing. Then she put her eye up against it and saw that it was true. She called to Moriarty. She wanted a witness to the biggest story she would never tell.

  ‘F-f-f-fuck me dead!’ Moriarty cried when he saw it.

  A neat hole was drilled clean through the kangaroo’s head.

  Author’s note

  This is a work of fiction based on real events in 1972 and 1973. I have imagined how some of these events may have played out and allowed real historical characters to intermingle with fictional characters in that context. Although much of the narrative really did happen I make no claim that this is a true history.

  Acknowledgements

  To the incomparable Richard Walsh, who unearthed this novel—buried in a manuscript that encompassed thirty-five years of the main characters’ lives—a deep debt of gratitude.

  There are many others who inspired its creation. Chief among them are my dear friends Mark Aarons and Pierre Vicary, who both taught me so much. Mark set me on the historical course this novel follows with his groundbreaking ABC radio documentary series, Nazis in Australia, while Pierre guided me on my first tour of Yugoslavia before the conflict and also on subsequent trips there during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The work of Dorde Licina, especially his book Dvadesiti Covjek (Centar za Informacije I Publicite, Zagreb, 1985), helped inform the narrative of the Bosnian incursion, which features the fictional revolutionary, Marin Katich.

  I would also like to thank the former policemen, ASIO men, politicians, political advisors and journalists who enhanced my understanding of the dramatic true events in 1972 and ’73 that underpin my fictional story. I would particularly like to thank Kerry Milte, former Commonwealth Police Superintendent, barrister and Renaissance man, who resolutely appears under his own name in The Twentieth Man.

  Profound thanks are also due to my wonderful and patient editors—my publisher Annette Barlow, and Sarah Baker and Rebecca Starford.

  And, above all, so much more than gratitude to my beloved wife Sarah, to whom I owe everything.