‘We wait,’ he said, uncertain. ‘We wait . . .’
His attention remained on the bomb site. An upwelling of air was wafting most of the smoke away, and figures were emerging. People. Coughing and dishevelled, but walking. And as more smoke cleared, I could see that relatively few actually seemed to be wounded or incapacitated. A little stunned, yes, but not hurt.
‘What the hell is this?’ Harry said, growing puzzled.
Outside our box, I could hear boots running and voices yelling about evacuation. Abruptly, our door burst open. We whirled around to see an Australian Army officer standing there, flanked by two privates.
‘Clear this box!’ he yelled, but then, bizarrely, all three stepped inside and closed the door behind them.
Harry didn’t seem at all surprised by the visitors. ‘Have you seen this?’ he said to the officer, gesturing to the view out the window.
‘Damnedest thing,’ the officer agreed. ‘Looks like it went off in a stairwell, not in the stand itself. And more like a smoke bomb than something designed to kill. Weird.’
‘Aisha here said she knew something was going off today.’
Military eyebrows went up. ‘Really?’
‘I didn’t believe her. Otherwise I would have told you. Sorry.’
‘Later. Right now we gotta go.’
‘It’s safe?’
‘Hell, in all this mess, we’d never get a better chance.’ He glanced at Aisha and me. Nodded to one of his privates. The soldier tossed three bundles of clothes at us.
I stared at the clothes blearily. They were uniforms.
‘Get dressed,’ the officer ordered.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
Harry was nodding urgently. ‘It’s our ride. Put on the damn uniforms.’
The officer winked a greeting. ‘You just got drafted, son.’
SEVENTEEN
My brother’s elevation, in the wake of 9-11, was to the newly created position of Special Minister Assisting the Attorney-General. Not an imposing title, perhaps, but in fact the Special Minister’s role was to formulate Australia’s response to the new threat of terrorism. This meant liaising between, and focusing the attention of, a whole range of different bodies—the military, the security groups, immigration, police and so on. The word ‘assisting’ meant that the Attorney-General was still officially in charge of it all, but effectively, Bernard was now Australia’s anti-terrorist supremo, and chief enforcer to boot.
The appointment certainly came as a surprise to me. And an upsetting one, because it meant that I’d lost my free ticket into the portfolio of Local Government. There was no business or financial advantage for me in having a brother as a security minister. But other political observers were puzzled too. The Liberals had won the 2001 election largely by promising to defend the nation more aggressively than anyone else might. So this new portfolio was a big deal. It was the jewel in the ‘war on terror’ crown. Yet it had been given to a relatively obscure minister like Bernard. Why?
Insiders, of course, knew the answer. But it would be a couple of years before I really understood it myself.
That happened on the day the US President came to town.
Actually, we all got a clue that day—23 October 2003—our first hint of what sort of Australia lay only a few years ahead. The location? Nowhere else but poor, benighted Canberra. You won’t remember the day, dear interrogators. A very minor event in your view of the world. But it was a huge thing here—President George W. Bush himself, jetting in to our capital city to personally thank our Prime Minister for standing firm in the coalition of the willing against Iraq. Okay, so George W. was on a whistlestop tour of the whole world right then, thanking allies left, right and centre, and Australia was getting less of his time than most. But still—the honour of it! And the kudos for John Howard, to spend a whole day at Bush’s side, sunbathing in all that superpower glow and glamour.
For the residents of Canberra, the honour was a little more mixed. After a night rendered sleepless by the constant drone of helicopters and the shrieks of patrolling jets, they emerged at dawn on the twenty-third to find their city occupied by the US. Not that anyone was surprised by the basic fact. Everyone had been warned, after all. The President was terrorist target number one, and if we wanted to be blessed with his presence, then surely we understood the necessity of some inconvenience for the sake of protecting him. And truly, no one argued with that.
What amazed people was the sheer scale of it. Until that day, Canberra (and the rest of the country with it) had barely heard of things like roadblocks and security checkpoints and armed soldiers on the streets. Now the city inhabitants found all their major roads shut down, and Parliament House itself—where the President would be addressing a combined sitting of both Houses—locked off by a cordon a mile in diameter. Canberra was a small place, with a radial transport system. Block off a mile-wide circle right in the centre, and the city ceased to function. Commuters trying to get to work that day ended up hours late, if they made it at all, stuck miles out in the country on some insane detour around the no-go zones.
Everyone could have put up with that if they’d at least known that the Australian security forces were in charge. If we were calling the shots. We weren’t. For that one day it was obvious to everyone that sovereignty of our national capital had been handed over to the United States. We were not to be trusted. Their forces were calling the shots, and they were doing so with a ruthless lack of apology. It didn’t matter that we were their allies, their friends, their most fervent supporters on the international scene. Wherever the US President set foot was American territory, it appeared, and us Aussies could just get the hell out of our own country, thank you.
I was there myself that day, shunted out of my normal digs at Rydges by the US occupation and forced to endure a room in a cheap motel halfway out to bloody Queanbeyan. A bother, but even so, initially, I had no particular concern about what was being done to Canberra. I was only in town because I had a big-shot American hotelier in tow. He’d been touring my resorts pursuant to investing some much-needed capital, and to butter him up, I’d promised him a chance to see his own President in action. By some adroit pestering of Bernard I’d managed to obtain two passes to the public gallery of the House of Representatives. Not an easy feat, considering ‘the public’ had been strictly banned access to the chamber.
So it was with some satisfaction that my American companion and I sallied forth to Parliament House that morning, passes in hand. Overhead, helicopters and jets blanketed the town. It really made you feel that you were at the centre of things, for once, even in sleepy old Canberra. (Whether they were Australian or American aircraft hardly seemed worth quibbling about. Indeed, the night before, we’d driven to the lookout on the top of Mt Ainslie to view the whole circus. We even managed a glimpse of Air Force One as it dived steeply towards the airport. At least, we thought it was Air Force One, but there was a lot of talk about decoy planes and so forth, so who really knew.)
My first doubts about it all only came when our taxi was stopped at a roadblock well beyond the edge of the security cordon, our destination still so far off in the distance that even the giant flagpole was barely visible.
‘Out,’ said the cab driver, after conferring with a man in AFP combat fatigues.
‘But we have passes,’ I replied.
‘Out,’ repeated the AFP man. ‘You walk from here.’
He might not actually have been an AFP man, of course. Rumour had it that the Federal Police (a modest department in those days) were so hopelessly stretched by the Americans’ demands that they had dressed up clerical staff in uniform to fill out their numbers on the street.
Either way, we got out and walked. We’d taken a roundabout route from the motel, and so were now approaching the new Parliament House via the old Parliament House—a pleasantly quiet and grassy prospect in normal times, rich with memories of bygone days in Australian politics. Today, though, the lawns were jammed with masses of po
lice and protesters, already lining up for the first skirmishes of the day. Not that any of the protestors were likely to catch the President’s attention at that distance. Those with megaphones were being instructed to point them towards Lake Burley Griffin, directly away from the new Parliament House. And those with anti-American placards? Well, debate seemed to be raging about which way they should point as well, just in case George, by some act of preternatural vision, might glimpse one from half a mile off.
We sauntered through the crowd rather pityingly, and made our way to the major checkpoint set up in Federation Mall. Our passes were approved, and we moved on. I was assuming that there would be nothing more until we reached Parliament House itself. I was wrong. We were stopped at another checkpoint, and then by roving security personnel to boot. Each time, our passes were examined with increasing severity and unhappiness. Questions were asked, other identification was demanded, enigmatic marks were scribbled on the backs of the papers. And while each checkpoint was manned, as far as I could tell, by Australians, I noticed a funny thing. Me, they didn’t like at all. I was just a civilian who had somehow scored an invite, but who obviously had no pressing reason to be there, and so was suspect. My friend, though—as soon as they heard his accent, all suspicion evaporated. An American! Yes, sir! Straight through, sir! It pissed me off a bit, to be honest.
Then we were on Capital Hill, and the glassy walls of Parliament House rose before us. And here there was very little pretence about who was running the day. The security stations at the front doors were surrounded by US personnel. And once again, they were not happy with me. Who was I? Why was I here? How did I get hold of a pass like this? In the end, I resorted to angrily explaining that I was the brother of the Special Minister Assisting the Attorney-General. Which worked surprisingly well. The Americans knew who Bernard was—he had been liaising with them directly about the President’s visit. So we made it through to the interior. And not everyone did. I saw one irate famous face—a Canberra correspondent for a TV network—being refused entry by resolute Americans because of some trifling error on his pass. And his cries of ‘But this is our Parliament House!’ were doing him no good at all.
There were even more checkpoints and roving inspectors inside, and by the time we neared the doors to the public gallery, I’d gone from pissed off to quite disturbed. ‘Where the fuck do they all come from?’ I complained to my friend. ‘Your guys must have brought half of Washington along.’
He smiled in amusement. ‘We’ve always got a lot of people in Canberra.’ He voted, he’d already told me, strictly Republican, and had links in high places. ‘I hear they’ve got tunnels and bunkers under the US embassy, stuffed with all sorts of secret service personnel. They reckon there’s even a tunnel that leads direct from there to here.’
‘I can believe it,’ I said, staring around. They did look as if they were pouring from some hole in the ground. A short distance off, an Australian news crew was being divested of a video camera, and a fight was nearly breaking out. Of course, everyone knew that cameras weren’t allowed in the House, so normally it wouldn’t have meant anything to me. Except that twenty yards away, at the entrance to the press gallery, an American film crew was sidling through the checkpoint, one of them grinning as the video camera tucked at his side was politely ignored by all. And even that didn’t really mean anything to me, at the time.
Then, after one last check of our passes, we were in. The House of Representatives, the seat of sovereign power. Okay, so most of the accents around me in the public gallery were American, but down in the chamber itself, reclining in their green leather seats, were the elected members and senators of the Commonwealth of Australia. No Yanks allowed. Except the President, of course. The sad truth was, Parliament wasn’t even supposed to be sitting right then. They’d called everyone back, at immense expense, just for this moment.
‘I gotta say,’ my companion observed, ‘I’m a little surprised that your government is standing for all this hoopla. I mean, it’s a bit subservient, don’t you think? A bit too willing?’
I agreed, some relic of national pride stirring inside me.
‘It’s one thing to be polite hosts,’ he added, ‘but I’m not sure this is really the right way to get respect for your country.’
Still, there was nothing to be done now except watch the show. And quite a show it turned out to be—to which the evening news here in Australia, and internationally too, later testified. Oh, the start was smooth enough—Bush swanning in to thunderous applause, with back pats and handshakes all round. A heart-warming speech from the PM (and a slightly less excited one from the Opposition Leader, who was getting no kudos out of this at all). Fine and dandy to that point, but then came the President’s own address, and the famous interruption by two Greens senators, leaping up with questions about Australian citizens stuck in Guantanamo Bay. Chaos! Howling outrage from the Speaker. The attempt to throw the senators out of the chamber. The scuffle in the upper seats when the senators refused to leave. The fuming brow on the Prime Minister. The smooth wink of George W., and his laughing reply of ‘I love free speech.’ And then, at the end, the running battle as the government members joined ranks to prevent the departing President being mobbed by Greens with petitions.
My American friend was in hysterics. ‘You’d never see this back home,’ he said through his tears.
Indeed. And no one outside the chamber would have seen it at all, if not for that American news crew with their contraband video camera. Oh, the scandal about that—from the Speaker, because his ban on cameras had been circumvented; from the government, because the Greens had embarrassed the entire nation; and most of all, from the Australian media, because they hadn’t been able to sneak a camera in, and had to steal the footage from American broadcasts.
My brother had been right in the thick of it, part of the human wall thrown up to block the Greens, and I’d been delighted to see him jostled and angry. I had no expectation of actually speaking to him that day, however, seeing I wasn’t invited to any of the more intimate functions he’d be attending. But when we emerged from the gallery and made our way towards the exit, I was surprised to see Bernard wandering around in the public area of the foyer. He was in the company of another man—an American, I guessed, even from a distance.
‘My brother,’ I said to my companion, pointing.
‘I see.’ Then his eyes narrowed. ‘Hey, look who’s with him.’
‘Who?’
‘That’s Nate Harvey. He’s the Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security, back in the States. Making quite a name for himself.’
Ah. So Bernard was hanging out with his US counterpart, security specialists the both of them. Perfectly natural, of course. But the sight impressed me somehow. The two men were simply ambling about the floor, gazing at the departing crowd as they conversed, and yet it was a glimpse of my brother in a way I hadn’t seen him before. He was with a high-powered American official, and yet he looked very much the other man’s equal. Not the usual dull, insipid Bernard at all.
We met them in the middle of the foyer, and introductions were made. ‘Nate,’ said Bernard, hand on the Assistant Secretary’s shoulder in an avuncular fashion. ‘This is my brother Leo. My older brother. By fifteen minutes.’
Laughter all around. And this was weird, because I knew for a fact Bernard hated being my little brother. Still, Nate was pleased to meet a fellow American, and it turned out he and my friend had acquaintances in common, and gossip to trade. Which left Bernard and I to talk between ourselves for a moment.
‘Bit of a mix-up, back there in the House,’ I said.
Even that couldn’t wipe the smile from Bernard’s face. ‘The Greens made fools of themselves. You wait. The papers will crucify them.’
(And he was right, they did.)
I had another dig. ‘So meanwhile it’s your job to be tour guide for Nate here, is it? Got nothing better to do than babysit Americans?’
He laughed at me. ‘Nothing
better at all.’
‘You two do seem very friendly.’
‘Oh, we go way back, Nate and I. He’s staying at my place.’
And it was the way he said it—I had a flash of comprehension. They really were old friends. No doubt it stemmed from all those tours Bernard had made to the US, but his relationship with this American bigwig was a cosy one. They liked each other. And finally I grasped why Bernard had been appointed to such a crucial position. Not only was he a loyal advocate of the war on terror. He was connected—with the Republicans, with the White House, with US security. And in the new world order, there was no connection more useful or more important.
Intriguing.
But soon enough Bernard and Nate were called away to more august company, and my American friend and I were left to wade our way out of Parliament House, and then down through the barricades again in search of a taxi.
‘So what did Nate think of the Greens?’ I asked. ‘Pretty disgraceful, from an American point of view, I’d think.’
‘He thought it was a good thing, actually.’
‘Really? How?’
‘Well, it makes the whole process look robust, doesn’t it? We might be monstering your government about the war and taking over your streets, but there’s still free speech, right? Like the President said.’
‘It’s hardly free speech if you get dragged out of the chamber for your trouble. Or when your capital city has been turned into a fortress around you.’
He laughed. ‘It’s true, Nate was just saying how Canberra is a security dream. The easiest place in the world to lock down. Small population. Centralised design. Miles from anywhere, off in the bush. Only three highways in and out. It might have been designed for a day like this.’
‘I don’t think that’s quite what Walter Burley Griffin had in mind.’
We were coming down to the lake, and ahead of us the Captain Cook fountain was spearing into the air.
My companion turned thoughtful. ‘No. But he’s a perceptive man, that Nate. You watch him. He’s not destined to just be Assistant Secretary forever. I hear he’s running for State Governor soon. And after that, who knows?’
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