by Peter Cotton
The road to Nowra wound through remnant heathland and wide green pastures full of sheep, goats, and alpacas. The separation between the splotches of oil had contracted to about thirty metres, a sure sign that the emergency vehicle’s oil seal was close to failure. Each time I rounded a bend, I expected to see Radcliffe standing by the side of the road next to his stricken bomb.
Tracts of pasture gave way to orchards, vineyards, and the occasional small factory. The separation between the splotches continued to narrow. Given the volume of oil he’d lost, there could be only one way Radcliffe was remaining mobile — he had to be topping up his oil as fast as he was losing it. If he was doing that, he could drive to Sydney and back, assuming he was carrying enough oil. And assuming the oil seal held. Which it wouldn’t.
Jervis Bay Road soon merged with the busy Princes Highway, and the splotches, now less than twenty metres apart, veered into the slow lane and stayed there. The condition of the emergency vehicle had probably forced the priest to drive well below the speed limit, which would’ve earnt him plenty of stick from some of the hotheads on the road.
Following the splotches, I took the Nowra turn-off and moved onto a mostly deserted road passing through a light industrial zone. After a couple of kilometres, the factories gave way to suburbia, and before long, the road joined up with Nowra’s main drag. It was quiet in the centre of town. The heat does that. There were only a handful of cars on the road and few people moving on the footpaths. I tracked the splotches past an empty car dealership and the ex-servicemen’s club. Then, in the middle of a deserted shopping strip, they suddenly disappeared.
I drove through a set of lights, pulled into the curb, and got out of the car to check things out. Radcliffe might’ve turned at the lights. Or done a U-turn and headed back the way he’d come. Or maybe he’d parked in one of the lanes that separated some of the buildings. I got back in the car, waited for a break in the traffic, and did a U-turn. There were no splotches on the road ahead, so I parked the car again and got out.
Standing on the footpath, contemplating my next move, I suddenly recognised the pizza place in front of me. I’d been here once before — when I came with Trainor to talk to Dave Calder. His office was a little way along the footpath, sandwiched between a laundromat and a Chinese restaurant. I walked down to have a look.
The laundromat was open, but empty. The blinds were drawn on Calder’s office, though the business hours listed in the window indicated that the place should’ve been open. The staff must’ve decided to close up shop, given the boss was still in intensive care. I felt a bit guilty about Calder, but only because I could’ve intervened when Trainor kept pressing him after he got agitated. Then again, who could’ve predicted it would end as it did, with him in hospital?
I looked up and down the footpath and decided to keep walking. I stopped and scanned the menu in the window of the closed Chinese restaurant. The chilli chicken was the only thing that took my fancy. I moved on and glanced down the paved lane at the side of the restaurant — there were no fresh oil marks on it as far as I could see. I peered through the dusty front window of a vacant shop on the other side of the lane. The interior was full of metal fittings and stacks of timber. I stepped out onto the road and looked up and down, searching for splotches, but saw none. So I returned to the footpath and started walking back towards the car.
I paused in front of the lane again. The walls on either side of it had been vandalised in recent times by taggers and half-baked stencil artists. And from the look of things, local lawlessness went beyond simple graffiti. New security screens protected the windows at the side of the restaurant. The sash windows down the side of the vacant shop were fronted by steel bars. Two bars on a window at the rear of the shop looked to have been prised apart. I took a step sideways to get a better view of the damage and a momentary glint near the end of the lane caught my eye.
I stepped back to where I’d been standing, and halfway through the movement, I caught the glint again. Then I realised what I was seeing: sunlight bouncing off a tiny splotch of oil near where the lane branched left and right to service the rear of the buildings.
I walked down the lane and, at the end of it, glanced right and then left. Sure enough, there was the emergency vehicle, parked at the end of the left-hand branch, behind what had to be the back of Calder’s office. A Jaguar V6 was parked next to it.
The blinds on Calder’s back windows were drawn — was Radcliffe in there with the owner of the Jag? All the other nearby places where he could have been were either deserted or closed. So if Radcliffe did have business in Calder’s office, what was the nature of it that he’d risk driving his emergency vehicle all the way in to Nowra to get it done? There was only one way to find out.
I knocked on Calder’s back door. A cop’s knock: knuckles hard on the ply, three strikes of equal force.
‘Hello,’ I said, bringing my face close to the door. ‘It’s the Australian Federal Police, here. Detective Darren Glass. Is Father Radcliffe inside? If he is, I need to speak to him, please. It’s urgent.’
I tried the handle, and the door swung open.
In front of me was a short corridor lined floor to ceiling with metal cabinets. I took a step inside. This didn’t feel right, somehow. I took out my Glock, but I let it hang low.
‘Father Radcliffe!’ I said, shouting his name. ‘Father, are you there?’
Something small and hard was rammed into the back of my head.
‘Freeze,’ said a guy, growling the word.
I did as he ordered, then heard a hiss, and my face was enveloped in a burning mist, my legs crumpled, and I blacked out.
23
I was conscious of being cool but uncomfortable. I tried to improve my position, but I couldn’t move. I sensed a strong light on the other side of my eyelids. It took a conscious effort to raise my head and open my eyes. Light beamed from three laptops lined up on a desk a few metres in front of me. The machines had the same screensaver — a close-up of a colourful parrot perched on a branch. The bird was eating something from its raised claw. The rest of the room was dark.
I tried to raise my hands but couldn’t move them. A thick band of cable ties secured my wrists to the padded armrests of a four-legged chair. My feet were pressed to the floor. I tried to move them, but the cutting pressure on my ankles and calves told me that they’d been secured to the legs of the chair. I couldn’t open my mouth. I stuck my tongue between my lips and encountered something sour. Tape.
Someone groaned beside me. I turned, and there was Father Radcliffe. His chin lolled up and down on his chest. He was secured to an office chair, as well, and had probably been sprayed with the same stupefier that’d got me.
‘In the land of the living, are we, Detective?’ said a man silhouetted in the open doorway.
I couldn’t make out his face, but I recognised the bulge on his hip — a holster — and I knew the voice. His identity was confirmed when he stepped into the glow of the laptops. Calder. He unholstered his pistol, a simple nine-millimetre. He held it at his side while he studied me for a moment. He was even thinner than when we’d interviewed him, and he looked completely spent. I wondered how he’d managed to lift the priest and me onto these chairs. Had someone done the job for him? He sat at the desk and swivelled in his chair so that he was sitting side-on to us. He checked me out again, then rested the weapon on his bony thigh and hit a key on the closest laptop.
The bird was replaced by a grainy CCTV image, which took in the contours of a steep wall that extended down to a two-lane road. A small section of the same sort of wall was visible on the other side of the road. I knew the place: the cutting, north of Creswell air base. Almost magically, the top of an armoured personnel carrier slid into view, followed by another, and another. The vehicles were sucked towards the camera as they passed underneath it. The last one moved out of shot, and the static road scene was restored.
> Calder rolled his chair to the middle laptop. He hit a key on the machine, and the bird there became a CCTV shot of the entire length of the causeway. Dozens of military vehicles and hundreds of troops filled the low ground on either side of the raised stretch of road. He tapped a key on the third machine and the bird resolved into a shot of the laneway just outside, and a sliver of the footpath beyond it.
‘So, you see it,’ said Calder, pointing at the middle screen. ‘Set and ready to go.’
He swung his chair around to face me, raised his pistol, and pointed it at my chest. Then he rolled towards me, reached out, and ripped the tape from my mouth. I barely registered the pain, such was my relief at having my mouth free again.
Calder pushed himself backwards till his chair bumped into the desk. Radcliffe groaned, and Calder and I turned and eyed him expectantly. The priest struggled on the threshold of consciousness for a moment, but his head lolled forward and slowly sank till it rested on his chest again.
‘Poor Father,’ said Calder, studying the comatose priest. ‘He wrestled with his demons, and they wore him out.’
‘What’s he doing here?’ I asked, truly confused about the priest’s presence.
‘Someone spilt their guts in confession — told him what we were up to. So he came here looking for me, hoping to appeal to my better nature, as he put it. Wanted me to do the right thing. Which makes him a rotten priest, when you think about it. I mean, wouldn’t most priests rather die than break the Seal of the Confessional?’
Calder’s eyes narrowed on the priest. He looked down at the weapon resting on his thigh, consumed by a thought. When he raised his eyes again, he had the look of a man who’d reached a decision.
‘Now that you know why he’s here,’ he said, lifting his pistol towards me again, ‘why don’t you tell me why you’re here?’
‘I was looking for Radcliffe,’ I said, my eyes on the quivering muzzle pointed at my head.
‘Congratulations. You found him.’
‘And what about you, Mr Calder? What are you doing here?’
‘Same as I’ve been doing for a very long time, Detective,’ he said, lowering the weapon to his thigh. ‘Preparing to give you gubbas a bloodied nose, a black eye, broken ribs, and maybe a punctured lung or two. We’ll see how we go.’
‘How are you going to do that?’
‘That’s the big secret, isn’t it? But you know what? I’m going to give you the drum. You and only you. All the details. After all, it’s only fair! You earnt that ringside seat, there, with all your bloody snooping around.
‘So, what’s it all been about? It’s Trident, you dickhead! That’s the only game in town. Always has been. Not Kylie and her sailor — call them collateral damage. The Indonesians? More cannon fodder. The attack on the base? A distraction. The tunnel system? A false trail. The second, non-existent tunnel? Absolute bullshit. All designed to put the wind up the sailor boys over at Creswell: promote a bit of panic, prompt a rash move. And it wasn’t hard, was it?’
‘What wasn’t hard?’
‘Getting Trident on the move! Their so-called maintenance kit — the spare warheads! You know, Detective, good sense dictates that when you’re attacked, you batten down the hatches, lick your wounds, and assess the threat. But not that lot. Ohhh nooooo. We applied a moderate bit of pressure, and they got spooked.’
So, everything was about Trident! The murders! The mayhem! Stacey the spook had called Trident a ‘remarkable secret’. Well, for one hostile at least, it was no secret at all. In fact, Calder was very well informed. He knew that the program’s maintenance kit would soon be on the move, and it seemed he was preparing to mount an attack on it.
He sat hunched over the screen that featured the shot of the causeway. He chuckled to himself, and the chuckle merged into a coughing fit that bent him over. He took a hanky from his pocket and put it to his mouth to bring the cough under control. He turned back to the screen, the hanky still pressed to his mouth.
‘What’s going to happen? I said. ‘What’s your plan?’
‘I’m going to blow it all up,’ he said, pocketing the hanky. ‘Trident — the whole fucking lot — is going to go when the lead vehicle gets here.’
He touched the corner of the screen showing the end of the causeway.
‘And I’ll blow this at the same time,’ he said, touching the screen showing the cutting.
‘How?’
‘I’ll press some buttons, and twenty-five bombs will go off under the causeway. Same thing with the cutting.’
‘How’s that possible?’
‘See the culverts under the causeway? Twenty-five of them, right? I’ve sewn bombs into all of them. A hundred kilos of Powergel Magnum in each, layered up in special cavities — ones I had built in when the culverts were being cast. We put the same array in the walls of the cutting. You’ll see.’
‘You can make it happen from here?’
‘Of course. I’ve got electronic detonators programmed to go off in sequence. And we’ll also hear it from here. Like one big bomb. That amount of super-heated gas? It’ll bounce off the clouds and crack like thunder.’
‘Were the things you did — the pressure you applied — was it all aimed at getting them to bring the Trident transfer forward?’
‘Look at me,’ said Calder, a half-smile lifting his sallow features. ‘How much time do you think I’ve got left? Death is close for all of us, but mine’s closer than you’d think. I needed to speed things up, so I followed the maxim: if the enemy is bigger than you are, prod them with something sharp. Make them angry and a bit scared. Then, if you’re lucky, they’ll try to retreat to a safer place, and in the transition, they’ll make themselves vulnerable to whatever you’ve prepared for them.’
‘Who said that?’ I said.
‘I did. I’ve had your sailors by the balls, Detective, and now I’ve got them exactly where I want them.’
Calder’s eyes brightened as though his pride had got the better of him. I swallowed and tried to process everything he’d just said. His plan was extreme, as well as quite simple. He’d planted bombs, with which he aimed to destroy a dozen nuclear warheads, a couple of ‘spare’ Trident missiles, and the programme’s massive maintenance ‘kit’. And everything in this investigation boiled down to a conspiracy he’d hatched to get the Trident material into his kill zone before he died of cancer.
If he succeeded in blowing it all up, it wouldn’t cause a nuclear explosion as such — nuclear warheads had to be armed to go off, and the detonation process was extremely complicated. But Calder’s conventional explosions would unleash the fissile material in the warheads — the plutonium and the uranium — and it’d shower down over a wide area, poisoning Jervis Bay and the neighbouring environment, and killing and disabling hundreds of people in the bay towns.
The attack would also kill hundreds, if not thousands, of military people. He intended to kill me and the priest as well, of course, though for some reason he was keeping us alive so we could watch his plan play out.
‘What sort of damage do you think you’ll do with this?’ I said, indicating the middle screen with a nod.
‘I don’t know,’ said Calder, seriously considering my question. ‘People within half a kilometre will be in serious trouble, I suppose. Debris from the transports could end up a kilometre away, given the amount of fuel they carry. And the radioactive fallout will spread far and wide. I haven’t seriously plotted the scale of the damage, but it will be massive. It is a massive attack, after all.’
‘Let me set you straight. The dirty bomb you’re about to create will kill thousands of people and pollute this whole area for generations. And you’ll go down as one of the most gutless villains this nation has ever produced.’
‘Sure, that might be the initial reaction. Especially among you gubbas. But eventually, that blast zone will be seen as a memorial to the h
undreds of thousands of Aboriginal people who lived miserable lives and died early deaths because of you lot.’
‘You must’ve spent many months, if not years, planning this — it’s so detailed. But why? Why do you want to do it? What’s happened in your life that it takes something this big to even things up?’
‘I’ve got time to talk, Detective,’ said Calder, smirking. ‘You’re not keeping me from anything. When the warheads hit the road, I’ll know, don’t worry. So what brought this on? I’ll tell you as you’re so interested. You’ve heard of Maralinga?’
‘South Australia? The British nuclear tests. 1950s and ’60s? The place they blew the shit out of and left as polluted as hell — that Maralinga?’
‘There were seven nuclear tests at Maralinga,’ said Calder. ‘But it was the so-called safety tests, the Vixen B program, that did the damage. Vixen B was designed to stress-test nuclear bombs in various situations. So they put a bomb in a simulated plane crash. Another one, they set on fire. And they blew up another one with conventional explosives. They used twenty-two kilos of plutonium in Vixen B, and they shot most of it a kilometre in the air and let it fall as poison on my people.’
‘So these Vixen B tests are the reason you’re doing this?’
‘Before Vixen B,’ said Calder, ‘the country around Maralinga was full of dreamtime tracks connecting the Anangu people, my people, to our ancestors. Vixen B destroyed all that, and the fallout gave us diarrhoea, vomiting, and fever, and later, lung disease and cancer.’
‘And you? I know you’re not well. Is that part of your story?’
Calder nodded.
‘I carry genetic damage,’ he said. ‘Passed down through my family. Because of Vixen B.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘You’re saying you inherited your cancer, somehow? Through your family? I don’t think it happens like that.’