by Peter Cotton
‘Then, the Yanks had a change of heart and invited the Poms to finish their tests in Nevada. The Poms jumped at the offer, and Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies was so angered by their desertion that he set wheels in motion for Australia to develop its own bomb. A secret cable from the time quotes a senior government advisor as saying, “the Bomb is necessary for Australia if we are to protect ourselves from the turbulent seas of Asia”.
‘Menzies allocated funds for the project. His successor, Harold Holt, selected a site on the southern tip of Jervis Bay for a reactor to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. Holt also gave the go-ahead for the construction of the facility. When John Gorton assumed the prime ministership, he funded an upgrade of Jervis Bay Road to allow easy access to the site, and excavations for the nuclear reactor and other buildings were completed during his tenure. Then Billy McMahon became Prime Minister.
‘As Foreign Minister, McMahon had signed a number of non-proliferation treaties. Australia hadn’t ratified them, but McMahon felt bound nevertheless, so he stopped all work on Jervis Bay, effectively ending Australia’s quest for the bomb. The only evidence of the project is Jervis Bay Road itself, and the whopping great car park at Murrays Beach. Underneath that car park are the excavations that were no longer required.’
Murphy paused and looked at Peterson expectantly.
‘Should I go on?’ he said, gently patting his silver quiff to ensure it was in place.
‘Please do,’ said Peterson, a study in admiration as he gazed at Murphy.
‘Let’s jump forward then,’ said Murphy, ‘to ten years ago when the Feeney Government approved the construction of the Johnson Carrier Base for Darwin. You’ll remember the anti-American demonstrations that followed that decision. They forced the city into lockdown every other week and eventually reduced the Territory’s economy to basket-case status. It all fanned anti-American sentiment in the general electorate, and Feeney’s majority was cut to a wafer-thin margin at the subsequent election.
‘The anti-base demonstrations had at least one other major consequence: five years ago, when the Americans sought to extend the tenure on their global surveillance facility at Pine Gap, Feeney told them that, in return, Australia needed a tangible reward for its loyalty. Effectively, he wanted compensation for the pain his party had suffered in satisfying the requirements of the alliance.
‘President Antonio’s response to Feeney’s entreaty was as swift as it was surprising. Antonio assured the Prime Minister that Australia’s “determined loyalty” would be rewarded with a gift suited to our needs. Months later, when I was consulting in PM&C, the US Secretary of State called the Secretary of the Department and said he wanted to “make apparent the actuality of the President’s earlier offer”. Amazing language, given what was to follow. “Make apparent the actuality of the President’s earlier offer.” God, I love this story.
‘Anyway, you can only truly appreciate that “actuality” by seeing it for yourself. So, if you can, lady and gentlemen, I’ll ask you to join me on a little expedition. It’s not far. Not off base or anything. And it’s something some of you need to see before you ponder further. And I really need to get back. So, Commander?’
Without further ado, Murphy stood up and headed straight out the door. When we got up to follow him, Peterson asked us to wait and he gathered up his papers from the coffee table. He called out to his secretary, who quickly appeared in the doorway, and he handed the papers to her. Then he led us out into a corridor hung thick with battle scenes from the sailing-ship era.
At the end of the corridor, he turned right and took us down two flights of steps to a deserted foyer. We went through the foyer and down another long corridor. In the middle of this corridor, Peterson opened a pair of double doors and we all stepped into a control room where three technicians in white overalls monitored a panel full of dials, lights, and switches. One of the technicians picked up a stack of freshly pressed orange overalls and handed a pair to each of us.
‘You’re required to wear these in the harbour,’ he said.
We slipped into our overalls, and Peterson led us around the control panel and down a short corridor to a pair of translucent glass doors, where three armed guards ran hand-held body-scanners over each of us in turn. My ribs protested as I lifted my arms to be scanned, and I braced for the errant bump that’d send me back to pain city. Thankfully, the guard was good at his job and barely touched me.
One of the guards gave the thumbs-up to a camera set high on the wall, a red light pulsed overhead, and the doors slid open to reveal the interior of one of the massive hangars that fronted the bay. My eyes were immediately drawn to a giant submarine, which rested in a dry-dock channel running the length of the bay-side wall. A line of car-sized chocks kept the vessel upright. Its propeller was hidden behind several layers of scaffolding.
Subs on deployment spent most of their time in the deepest water, silent and out of sight. When they moved on the surface, you only ever saw a small section of their hull and their conning tower. Like icebergs, most of their mass remained submerged.
This was the first time I’d seen a sub out of the water, and the thing that impressed me straight up was its size. It was essentially a massive cylinder of dark steel, wider than a three-lane highway, as tall as a six-storey building, and almost two hundred metres long. The funny thing was, out of its element and cradled in a dry dock, it didn’t look all that potent. In fact, it appeared exposed and vulnerable somehow, and more like a beached whale than a lethal war-fighting machine.
A crane lowered a net full of boxes towards an open hatch just forward of the conning tower. Four sailors in overalls stood around the hatch, ready to manoeuvre the cargo into the vessel’s interior.
A shower of sparks drew my eyes to a sailor spot-welding in one of the open cubicles that lined the back wall of the hangar. The sailor in the cubicle next to him used a lathe to turn pieces of steel. In a bigger cubicle, a group of sailors stood deep in discussion around a large machine part that I couldn’t identify.
Peterson strode off towards the sub, and we scrambled after him. I figured that the ‘reveal’ Murphy had promised was linked to the vessel, so I thought — no, I hoped — that Peterson was going to take us on board. But he walked straight past the sub and through a storage area stacked high with wooden crates and various-shaped objects wrapped in white plastic. We squeezed between two huge crates and followed him to a big steel door set into the reinforced wall that bisected the hangar.
The area screamed high security, as did the four heavily armed sailors who emerged from a guardhouse next to the door and blocked our path. They scanned us and ran our passes through a hand-held authenticator. Satisfied, one of them slid back the door to reveal another cavernous chamber and another submarine, which floated in a flooded section of the dry dock.
Murphy sat in a director’s chair on a low platform next to the sub’s giant conning tower. He had his head tilted towards the ceiling as a young woman applied make-up to his face. A guy in sunglasses sat in another director’s chair watching the make-up go on. A third guy made adjustments to a Steadicam that hung from his shoulders. The whole scene glowed under five sets of studio lights.
In the centre of the hangar, two giant missiles reclined on separate low-loaders, parked side by side. The missiles were about twelve metres long, a couple of metres wide, and they were black, except for their flattened nose cones, which were a brilliant white. I’d only ever seen armaments like them in photos from May Day parades on Red Square.
Dozens of wooden crates had been arranged to form a low wall that partly encircled the missiles. Half the crates were small, most of the rest were a few metres long, except for five which looked big enough to house a small truck. All the crates bore strings of letters and numbers, plus a large radioactive symbol and an even larger sticker bearing the American flag.
As we approached, Murphy turned his h
ead and hit us with his trademark smile. The fresh make-up, his beaming eyes, and the implanted teeth combined to give him the appearance of a man decades younger than the one who’d addressed us just minutes before. He stood up, removed a strip of protective tissue paper from his shirt collar, and turned to face us.
‘In a little over half an hour,’ he said, ‘Mr Feeney will tell Australia pretty much the same story I gave you upstairs. Then he’ll look down the barrel of the camera and he’ll say …’
Murphy took a sheet of paper from his pocket and held it close to his eyes as he read.
‘My fellow Australians,’ he said, in a grave tone, bordering on the melodramatic. ‘It’s my honour to serve you and, through you, to serve our nation. In my time as Prime Minister, I’ve done all I could to promote self-reliance when it comes to our defence.
‘To that end, today I can reveal that the four Omaha-class submarines we acquired from the United States of America two years ago were not only nuclear-powered, each of them was equipped with twelve Trident Four intercontinental ballistic missiles, each fitted with a nuclear warhead.
‘We obtained these weapons under a similar lease agreement to that which sees the US supply Britain with its Trident system. Like the British, the submarines we acquired, and the Trident missiles they’re armed with, remain under our control and are ours to deploy as we see fit.’
Murphy folded the sheet of paper into quarters and looked up. His gaze locked onto McHenry. The boss stood rigid, his face red, his mouth agape, as if he had something to say but couldn’t get it out. I was having trouble processing Murphy’s startling news as well.
‘I don’t want to steal any more of the PM’s thunder,’ said Murphy, ‘but when he’s done, at about five past seven, they’ll throw to me to fill in with pictures for ten minutes. Then, it’s off to Canberra for the Q and A.’
BLOOD OATH NEWS BLOG
SUNDAY 4 DECEMBER, 7.00PM
Australia and Indonesia are edging closer to war with the release in Canberra this afternoon of documentary evidence pointing to the involvement of elements of the Indonesian military in the attack on the Creswell Naval Base less than twenty-four hours ago.
A spokesperson for Prime Minister Lou Feeney told Blood Oath that Australian security forces, including the military, had been placed on high alert in the wake of the attack, and all Australian commercial flights into Indonesia had been cancelled, as had Australian landing privileges for all Indonesian carriers.
A spokesperson for Indonesian President Saleh Maharani has conceded that members of the Indonesian military participated in what he called the ‘Creswell incident’. However, the spokesman said the men were part of an extreme nationalist organisation whose leadership had been arrested in recent hours.
Speaking in Question Time today, Defence Minister Evan Buckholtz said Indonesia had chosen to punch Australia, so it shouldn’t be surprised if Australia punched back. In the same speech, the minister said Indonesia’s decision to release the Australians being held in Jayapura was starting to look like the act of a country with a guilty conscience.
20
We’d moved to the far corner of the hangar to give Murphy plenty of space to do his thing. He and his producer stood under a dimmed studio light, flipping through a script. For a historian about to participate in history, Murphy didn’t seem at all nervous.
‘You’re looking at most of the spares for our Trident program right there,’ said Peterson, gesturing at the crates and the missiles. ‘Guidance and re-entry systems. A dozen warheads. Two spare missiles. Plus a complete maintenance kit. Sadly, all soon to leave us.’
‘Where’s it going?’ I asked, transfixed by the hardware.
Peterson glanced at Stacey, seeking guidance as to how much he should share.
‘The plan was always for the Trident command to be housed in a purpose-built facility at Stirling in Western Australia,’ said Stacey, taking the reins. ‘The work at Stirling is nearly completed, so the government has brought the transfer forward. Everything here flies west in a day or two. The two Tridents on patrol will finish their deployments there. And the Tridents you see here will join them at the end of their next deployment.’
‘You say the government brought this transfer forward,’ I said. ‘Was that prompted by the attack?’
‘Hold on a sec,’ said Stacey, his stern eyes locked on Murphy.
I was about to push him when the lighting on the set was suddenly ratcheted up a few notches. Murphy checked his tie and shot a glance at the submarine behind him. The producer gave a finger countdown, from five, to four, to three, to two, to one. And Murphy launched in.
I couldn’t hear anything he said — his low-key delivery plus the physical distance between us reduced his words to a distant mumble. A couple of minutes into his spiel, Murphy pushed up onto his toes, and like an elderly dancer, he began a slow pivot. His cameraman sidestepped with him, keeping him front-on and in-shot till Murphy had the missiles and the wooden crates for a backdrop.
He raised his hands and leant towards the lens like a TV quizmaster revealing the prize of the day. ‘Something you’ve always wanted, Australia!’ I imagined him saying. ‘It’s nuclear. It’s a weapon. Not one! Not two! No! A whole arsenal of nuclear weapons! Congratulations! Happy days! Oi! Oi! Oi!’
‘You’ve had these things for a couple of years, and no one spilt the beans?’ said McHenry, his eyes on Murphy. ‘Where’d you find so many see-everything, say-nothing types?’
‘We submariners are called the silent service for good reason,’ said Peterson, his upper lip betraying a hint of a smile. ‘And I choose my people carefully, so that they stay with us. I’ve only lost two since the Tridents arrived. One died of colon cancer. The other’s in prison. Killed his brother over a car. Very sad. And even sadder for him because he’s served every day of his sentence in solitary. Two years now. Our systems are nothing like they were when he was here, but simply knowing about Trident made him an Alpha-A risk. Today’s announcement means he’ll be moved to the general population, so he can mix with people again, which makes me happy.’
‘Was Trident the target of the attack here?’ I said.
‘I wouldn’t say it was the target,’ said Peterson, ‘but the attacking force certainly concentrated its efforts on this part of the base.’
‘Is Trident the key to the Stevens and Sheridan murders?’ I said, looking at Stacey, wanting him talking again.
‘I can’t say how,’ he said, returning my gaze, ‘but that’s a fair assumption.’
‘Given the complexity of a program like Trident,’ I said, in a tone as neutral as I could muster, ‘I assume lots of people on the base work on it, and that a person couldn’t work on it without knowing what they were working on.’
‘A portion of each crew knows,’ said Stacey. ‘And most of the techs, of course, and there’s plenty of them. That fact alone left us exposed in the early days.’
‘Because someone might be indiscreet?’ I said, anticipating another revelation.
‘I never feared that. No. The thing is, four years ago when we began remodelling this hangar for Trident, the base could only accommodate a few of the techs we needed to bring on for the job. The rest had to set up home in Nowra and other places around here. And lots of the techs brought families with them. So, imagine that. A sudden influx of hundreds of people. It was impossible to hide, and it had our adversaries speculating about the sudden concentration of brainpower on the base. So, you know what makes me prouder than anything? That Trident only ever amounted to a suspicion among those who’d do us harm. We know that for a fact. So, none of our people were “indiscreet”, as you put it, Detective.’
‘How did Sheridan fit in?’
‘He was one of ours,’ said Stacey, suddenly downcast. ‘One of mine. And it’s a loss, God knows it’s a loss. Because Shero was special. A wunderkind really.’
&
nbsp; ‘Did he know about Trident?’ I said.
‘No. Some need to know. Some don’t. And our caution with Shero was vindicated, given how things turned out.’
‘Is it fair to assume that the people who murdered him thought he knew what was going on here?’
‘That’s a fair assumption.’
‘And I assume they’re the mob who attacked this place.’
‘That’d be fair, too.’
‘What did Sheridan do for you?’ I asked.
‘His job?’ said Stacey, dropping his head, pausing to think. ‘He cultivated people. He was cultivated. He tried to convince his marks he knew things he didn’t. In bars and pubs in Nowra and beyond. He’d down a few drinks and bellyache a bit. Half-baked stuff. Imprudent rather than dangerous. The sort of carry-on you’d expect from a half-cut, disaffected type. He only ever attracted a bit of attention. But it turned out to be the right sort of attention. A group put time into him. Checked his antecedents. Hacked his machine to assess his appetites. Then a month ago, Bynder sidled up to him in the Ulladulla pub and offered to buy him a drink.’
‘And you knew about Bynder already, at that stage?’
‘We did,’ said Stacey. ‘But we assessed him as a lone agitator. One with some loose associations. That changed when he initiated the contact with Shero. Of course, we didn’t know who he was working for, so we had no real sense of him. And in the five meetings Shero had with him, we got little of value. But Shero reckoned Bynder trusted him, so we encouraged the contact.’
‘What did Bynder want?’ I asked.
‘Details on the physical security here,’ said Stacey. ‘So Shero gave him a sketch of the layout. Nothing useful. Then Bynder asked him to fill out the sketch, so Shero gave him a more detailed rendering, but nothing even bordering on classified. That’s when Bynder upped the ante. Asked for the hamburger with the lot. Entry codes for the gates on the main jetty. Various keys, including one for the Commander’s office. He wanted uniforms, half-a-dozen communicators, and the addresses of all staff living off-base. You get the picture. If he’d got what he wanted, I for one wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation with you.’