Draw the Brisbane Line (37 page)

Jenny and Dave clung to each other, and didn’t let go throughout the bumpy helicopter ride.  They took turns at nodding off to sleep, exhaustion laying its overdue claim on them, and they would stir and wake up to the other one whispering in their ear:
I’m sorry.  I love you.  Forgive me.
  By both of them asking for forgiveness, it appeared to have been granted by default.

Jenny found it hard to fight off sleep once she invited it in.  Before they left Byron, Aldous Weir shuffled towards them through the debris and the slowly stirring bodies and the shattered peace.  Jenny thought he might try to talk her out of getting back into the Blackhawk, that he’d beg her to stay with him, testify to the commitment and strength shown by the QTA contingent in the face of anarchy — or whatever sound bite he had prepared for the media.  Instead, he handed her a mobile phone.  A short passage of text in an email was displayed on the screen:
Kirsty and Doyle Schenk found on highway near Caboolture.  Taken to Toowoomba by Army.  Safe.
  She hugged him like he couldn’t feel pain, and he pretended that he didn’t.

There had been a lot of angry words exchanged between Al and the two Americans before they flew away with Jenny and Dave.  And with Cummings, the QTA pilot.  While they were all shouting, Jenny said her goodbyes and thanks to Banksia and Tait.

‘No more stealing cars,’ Jenny said to Tait.

‘Hey, I’m none from one,’ he said.  ‘Think I’ll quit before it gets any worse.’

Jenny laughed and kissed him on the cheek.  He tasted like dirty sweaty boy.

With Banksia, she was a lot more careful embracing her than she had been with Al.  Banksia, however, was having none of it, and she hugged her like an old friend bidding a last goodbye.

‘You’re trying to cover me with as much of your bodily fluids as you can, aren’t you?’ Jenny said.

Banksia pulled back from the embrace, smiling deeply and broadly despite the obvious pain she felt.  She kissed Jenny on the lips and gave her one last quick hug. 

Banksia Mackie, smiling and waving and bloody and torn, was the last thing Jenny saw before the Blackhawk’s doors were closed and they lifted off into the morning sky, bound for the Army base at Toowoomba.

‘I love you,’ Dave murmured into her ear, somewhere between here and there.  ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too,’ she said.  ‘Me too.’

They were greeted at the airfield in Toowoomba by five armed soldiers.  Americans, as it turned out.  They cuffed Pia, read her some kind of statement, and led them all to a hangar where a Lear Jet was being fuelled and checked.  Someone had brought a wheelchair for Dave, who could barely walk, but when Jenny mentioned that the smell of aviation fuel was making her woozy, he pushed himself out of the chair and pulled her down into it.

Stupid chivalrous bastard
, she thought, and smiled.  He hobbled along beside her like a B-movie portrayal of Doctor Frankenstein’s hunchback assistant Igor. 

She didn’t stay in the chair long once they were under the cover of the hangar, because her eyes adjusted to the change in light, and she saw who was waiting for her.  She got out of the chair just in time to take the running force of her nephew Doyle as he hit her in a waist-high hug.  Kirsty was close behind, looking like she’d just come out the back end of a day-long drinking session, and she engulfed her son and her sister in a long embrace.  Jenny felt hot tears on her neck.

‘I thought,’ she said, and paused.  ‘I thought we’d had it.  Someone took all our petrol.  Cars were on fire all around us.  Then the bush fire …’ Sobs racked her body now, and Jenny did her best to calm her, smoothing her hair, saying
shhh
.  But then her own eyes started to betray her, blurring and stinging.

‘We all thought a lot of things,’ she said.

‘Why is that lady tied up?’ Doyle said from between them.  He was watching Pia being led towards the jet by the soldiers.  ‘Did she do something bad?’

‘Yeah,’ Jenny said.  ‘She kind of did.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She ran away from home,’ Jenny said, and she felt a great joy to see a smile break out on her sister’s face.

‘Yeah,’ Kirsty said to Doyle.  ‘So don’t you ever think about running away.’

‘I won’t,’ he said firmly, and hugged Jenny tighter.

Dave couldn’t get close enough to Pia to ask her how she was, to reassure her that he’d do everything he could to ensure she was cleared of wrongdoing … if he could.  The soldiers surrounded her in a ring and marched her towards the jet, and Bryk followed up the rear at a pace Dave couldn’t hope to match in his battered state.  As they approached the short stairway to the plane, a figure appeared in the open doorway, filling slightly more of it than he would have done a year ago. 

Dave stopped trying to walk as Tom Holden stepped down out of the jet.  His brother could bloody well come to him.  And he did, after a curt nod to Pia (probably a wink too, if he knew his brother), before she boarded the aircraft with Bryk right behind her.

Tom looked like Dave, identical but for the extra weight, the longer hair and the black-rimmed glasses.  One of the lesser-known facts about Tom Holden was that he didn’t actually need to wear glasses — he had near-perfect eyesight.  He confided to Dave that he wore them so that he was less likely to be mistaken for the tennis ace, which might be true, but Dave suspected he also thought they made him look smarter.

Which, Dave had to admit, they did.

The brothers embraced, but Tom knew not to squeeze too hard.  He held Dave out at an arm’s length.

‘You look like shit on burnt toast,’ Tom said with a smile.

‘Don’t sugar-coat it,’ Dave said, smiling back.  ‘You and your politician’s slippery smooth talk.’

Tom laughed.  ‘Come on, we’re going to take a little trip.’

‘Yay,’ Dave squeaked.

Dave said hello and goodbye to Kirsty, while Tom greeted Jenny with an unrestrained bear hug.  Kirsty pulled Dave close and said into his ear quietly enough so Doyle couldn’t overhear, ‘You’ve got her back now.  Don’t fuck it up.  You do and I’ll finish you off.’

‘You mean, like kill me?  Or …’

She slapped him on the shoulder, untroubled by his girlish wince.  There wasn’t a part of him not broken or cut or bruised.

Tom boarded the jet first.  He’d always been like that, even as a child, charging out in front on family outings without once looking back to see if Dave and their parents were keeping up.  He got himself lost more than a few times.  Dave and Jenny followed him on-board with hands interlocked.  The armed escorts stood at the bottom of the stairs, assault weapons at-arms, apparently instructed to hold their position until the plane was in the air.

The interior of the plane was small but incredibly comfortable. Six plush tan leather seats, more like armchairs, filled the space, four of the seats arranged meeting-style.  Pia and Bryk occupied the additional forward-facing pair.  Pia’s hands were bound in front of her with black plastic ties, but she didn’t appear to be bothered by the bonds as she leaned back into the plane’s soft embrace, her eyes closed and her face free of the frown lines she’d been wearing since Dave had met her.  She actually appeared to be relaxed.

‘I’m guessing this isn’t a military aircraft,’ Dave said as he took his seat, Tom opposite him.  A groan of pleasure nearly slipped out as the weight came off his damaged knee.  The seat felt like it was padded with memory foam and wrapped in the softest kid leather available — which it probably was.

‘It’s a loaner,’ Tom said.  ‘Belonged to the Westfield Group, was taken by administrators a couple of months ago.  They haven’t found a buyer yet.’

‘And you’ve what?  Offered to help them find one?’

Tom smiled, eyes glinting with a mischief Dave knew so well.  ‘Something like that,’ he said.

Dave was surprised when the plane started moving, no welcome or safety presentation in evidence.  Everyone buckled in.

Jenny and Dave had to reach across the gap between the seats — not large enough to be called an aisle — to keep hold of each other’s hand.

The plane rolled out to the runway, and the engines roared to life.  The brakes held them in place, but the craft hummed with power desperate to be released.

‘So where are we going, exactly,’ Dave asked his brother.

‘North, inexactly,’ Tom said.  ‘Up north.’

The plane launched forward, and the dips and bumps on the tarmac which would go unnoticed on a commercial aircraft were highlighted by the smaller vessel.  Dave was suddenly worried about potholes.  It had barely lifted off the ground, however, before Dave and Jenny both fell asleep, their fingers still loosely interlocked.  The last thing Dave heard before he slipped into unconsciousness was his brother saying, ‘Lieutenant Bryk, please remove those godawful ties from Corporal Papetti’s wrists.’

Dave stirred from sleep with the sun warming his face through the plane’s small windows.  Jenny was still sound asleep in the seat beside him, her arm draped awkwardly over the side of the chair.  He lifted it gently back to the armrest.

‘Look at that,’ Tom said, peering out the window.

Dave looked out and saw a lot of bush and dirt stretching as far as he could see, interrupted by a thin ridge of a low mountain range running north to south, like a wrinkle on an otherwise flat sheet.  Beneath them was a small cluster of buildings, not enough to be called a town, all nestled into the base of one of the large hills, huddled around a tiny lake.  Or a pond.

‘We always seek out the broken places,’ Tom said.  ‘As a species.  All this flat open land available and we’re drawn to the mountains, the valleys, the ruptures and the crumbling edges of the land.  The cracks in the country.  We’re drawn to moisture, like bacteria.’

‘I see you’ve held onto your positive outlook,’ Dave croaked.  His throat felt like it had been used to polish stones.  He shifted slightly in his chair and discovered that movement of any kind was to be rewarded with hot sharp needles of agony, everywhere and anywhere.  ‘Painkillers,’ he croaked.

Tom shook his head sadly.  ‘Not even a decent whisky.  Lieutenant Bryk.’

‘Mr Holden?’ The big man rumbled from the row behind him.

‘Do you have any painkillers for my brother?’

Bryk stood up and threatened to punch a hole through the roof of the aircraft with his head.  He shuffled towards Dave’s seat while feeling around in one of the pockets of his leather jacket.  He produced a small tube, flipped the end off with his thumb and slipped out a small syringe filled with a clear liquid.

‘I don’t have any aspirin,’ he said.  ‘But I got this.  Special home remedy.’

‘I don’t,’ Dave said.  ‘I can’t …’

‘You can’t what?’ Tom said.  ‘Do drugs?  Don’t worry, no-one’s going to test you.  That D-9?’

Bryk nodded.  ‘Cloud nine.’

‘Besides,’ Tom said, ‘no known test out there would pick up this stuff.’

‘But I don’t want to …’ Dave began to protest, but found he couldn’t finish the thought.  He didn’t want to what?  Do drugs?  Take a needle?  Feel better?

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Tom said.  ‘Just hit the fucking boy scout.’

Bryk grabbed Dave’s right hand with his left and plunged the needle into the crook of his arm.  Dave lurched forward in his seat, his body reacting as though it had just been dropped into an icy lake.

‘Great stuff, isn’t it?’ Tom said.  ‘I took a hit of it at the ugly end of a jet-lagged hangover, made me feel like bloody Superman.’

‘I remember,’ Pia said with a smile, peering around Bryk.

‘Yes you do,’ Tom laughed.

Dave felt like … like … like he could do
anything
.  The pain was a memory, and his damaged knee felt merely stiff.  He moved to stand up, but Bryk placed a meaty paw on his chest and pushed him back into his seat.

‘You better stay seated,’ Bryk said.  ‘Cloud nine takes the pain away, but it doesn’t heal you.  Your knee is still busted up.’

‘Better do what he says,’ Jenny said, looking over at him with sleep weary eyes. ‘Orcs are notoriously bad-tempered.’  She tugged on his sleeve.  ‘Mr Orc?  Is that stuff safe for pregnant women?’

Dave did not sleep again for the rest of the flight, or at any time that day. Despite the trauma his body had suffered, and his physical state of exhaustion, he would be awake for another forty hours.

But he didn’t care, because he actually felt pretty good.

Jenny dozed in and out of sleep, but Tom was wide awake and did was he liked doing best: he talked.

‘Only now, people are starting to say
they should have seen this coming
,’ he said. ‘But they
did
.  They
did
see this coming. The massive economic contraction, the recessions, the depression, the fundamental collapse … they knew it would happen eventually. They just hoped it wouldn’t happen on
their
watch. They never looked past the next election.’

‘This is why everyone hates you Tom,’ Dave said. ‘Such a Cassandra.’

‘Yeah, no-one believed Cassandra either.’

Dave peeked over Tom’s head. Bryk was either awake and alert, or someone had flipped the switch under his shirt from
on
to
standby
. Pia was no longer wrist-bound in the seat next to him, she was curled up beside Tom with her head flopped almost all the way to her shoulder, her mouth open as she slept. A thin trail of drool stretched out between her cheek and her shirt like an aborted spider web.

‘Why did you send her?’ Dave said.

‘Even if you could get where we’re going on your own — which I guarantee, you couldn’t have — would you have done it on the strength of a phone call?’

‘Of course not. But why her?’ He leaned in closer and lowered his voice. ‘I understand that you two have something going on, but … shouldn’t she be in therapy?’

‘Maybe. She felt this trip would be better than talking to a psychiatrist. And plan A was not for her to escort you up here — she was just going to ask nicely if you wanted to accompany her.’

‘It didn’t seem like I had much of a choice.’

Tom shook his head. ‘No, not after that Cain mess.’

Dave’s skull tightened, as though the pressure in the cabin had suddenly increased. Maybe it had.

‘I didn’t … I didn’t
want
him to jump. I wish he didn’t.
Fuck
, I really wish he didn’t.’

‘Why, because you cared about him as a person? The guy was the CEO of the largest bank in the country by assets. And he was behind the wheel when it sank. If you want to extend the metaphor, you could argue that he was just doing what all good captains do: he went down with the ship.’

‘What?  He … CEO of what?  What ship?’

Tom slapped his palm to his forehead and his mouth fell open.  Theatrical disbelief.  ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know who James Cain was.’

‘I’d
met
him before, I think,’ Dave said.  ‘But I couldn’t place him.’

‘What, not celebrity enough for you?  He was the CEO of the Commerce Bank of Australia.’

‘Shit,’ Dave said.

‘Yeah, shit.  And do you know why he killed himself?’

Dave thought back to his conversation with Cain.  ‘Because he was sad?’

‘Sad?  Are you serious?  The man was a clinical psychopath, he didn’t feel sad.  No, he killed himself because he couldn’t come to terms with his failure.’

‘What failure?  CEO of the CBA doesn’t sound like such a failure.’

‘It does when the bank collapses,’ Tom said.  ‘Which is what will formally happen on Monday morning.  If you think the rioting and looting is bad now … oh boy, wait for that bomb to drop.  The country’s largest financial institution is about to sink below the surface, dragging a lot of people with it, and James Cain was at the wheel when it happened.  And he jumped off your balcony.’

‘What do people expect me to do? Tackle the prick?’

‘Sorry mate, you’re Dave Holden. You’re expected to do the right thing, the good thing. Even when that means there’s a cost to you personally. That’s the standard you’ve set.’

‘Look who’s talking. You become a pariah by breaking the golden rule of politics. You spoke unpopular truths. And why? Because it was the right thing to do.’

‘I did the things I did because they were
right
. Not because they were the right things to do.’

‘There’s a difference?’

Tom leaned across and gripped Dave by the shoulder. Pain whispered from deep inside his body, but it was quiet enough to disregard. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is why you need some time away from this country. Away from your own public image. When you
do
, it’s about
you
. Right is about truth, not self.’

‘You are so fucking zen,’ Pia muttered.

Tom glanced at her and grinned.

‘You must know the media are going to tear you down for this,’ he said. ‘You fucked up in the first instance by having a public bust-up with Jenny. Pretty soon it’ll come out that she’s in the family way.’

‘How did you know —’ Dave started to say, but Tom held his hand up.

‘Phone taps,’ Tom said. ‘Media plants, but they’re not the only ones listening. They didn’t have enough of a reason to expose themselves with a pregnancy and domestic story, but adding in James Cain’s acrobatics, Pia’s fearless defence of your good self, and all this murky mess with Jenny and the QTA … whatever shit they cook up, you can guarantee it’s not going to be good. Anything to distract the masses from their freshly inherited misery, something to get them to tune in, to log on. You can’t give them fresh, wholesome milk any more Dave, so they’re going to peck at your carcass until there’s nothing left but bones.’

Dave waited for the headache to arrive. He thought it should be there any moment, but cloud nine seemed to be holding it at bay. This was all just, so …
fucked
.

‘That’s going to kill the Weetbix deal, isn’t it?’ Dave said with a tired laugh.

‘Probably,’ Tom said. ‘But if that didn’t, there’s something else.’

Dave pushed himself back into the seat. A
something else
from Tom was never a small thing. His
something else
usually made whatever had preceded it a trifle, a distraction.

‘What something else?’ Dave said.

‘The reason you’re here,’ Tom said. ‘You and Jenny both. It’s not something you’ve done, but it’s something which will have an impact on you. Especially after the events of the last mad day. Do you have any idea of the depth of shit this country now finds itself in? We just lost over a third of our internal credit supply. Poof. Gone, forgotten like the fiction it was. The other banks will fall any day now, as the world abandons us and starts demanding their money back. The only hope we have of maintaining
civilisation
here is a good old-fashioned government bailout of the banking sector. But guess what?’

‘They can’t afford it?’

‘Bingo. Quantitative easing has already murdered the dollar, they’ve run out of options. So what do you do when you need fast cash?’

‘You sell something,’ Jenny muttered from behind the curtain of her slumber.

‘That’s right beautiful,’ Tom said. ‘You sell something.’

The words circled Dave’s mind like sharks waiting to strike.
You sell something
. Coal and iron ore was a shrinking industry, barely able to support its own existence. The residential property market, the other big industry, was going to be about as helpful as a glass of water in a bush fire.

So what else was there?

‘We’re almost there,’ Tom said. He unlatched his seat belt and moved towards the cockpit.

‘I thought the routine, when about to land, was to take your seats and fasten your belts,’ Jenny said. ‘Not the opposite.’

Dave just smiled and said, ‘Because Tom.’

Jenny smiled back and said, ‘Ah. Of course.’

She traced her fingers across Dave’s palm and he squeezed them, warm and dry little things.

The plane began to tilt to the left and downward ever so slightly, and after a couple of minutes of that it swung back the other way. Dave felt his insides shift from left to right like a slow and fleshy pendulum. Tom came climbing back out of the cabin and up the narrow aisle, reaching out for balance on the seat backs. Pia slapped him on the rear as he passed her. A quick grin flashed across his face.

‘We’re here,’ Tom said to Jenny and Dave. ‘Dave, out your window mate.’

Jenny unbuckled her belt and slid over onto Dave’s lap. His hands circled her waist, and the motion felt so natural, so right. That tight groove between her hip and her thigh, it softly cupped his forearm, two pieces of the same warm puzzle. It seemed inconceivable to him that he could have come so close to losing her.

To throwing it away.

They shared a viewing space, cheek-to-cheek before the viewing window as they looked down on something that snatched Dave’s breath and replaced it with a cold ball of shock.

‘Where is this?’ Dave said to his brother, unable to peel his eyes from the scene.

‘Weipa,’ Tom said.

Weipa
? That didn’t make sense. Dave had a better than average knowledge of Australian geography — he’d crossed much of it during his career, and touched down in most places the flying kangaroo could take him — and while he’d never been to Weipa, he knew it was a virtual postage stamp of a town, little more than ten square kilometres and a few thousand souls who sweltered in the heat and hoped for a resurgence in the industry which gave the town life: mining. Bauxite, in Weipa’s case, long red cliffs of the stuff. It was the largest town along the Gulf of Carpentaria, but even that generous statistic didn’t tally with the crowded and swarming activity across the landscape below.

Hundreds. Had to be hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. Boats and ships, from kayaks to hulking cargo vessels, crowded the coastline like ants on a honey spill.  If the Cape York Peninsula was a tooth, then Weipa was its cavity, and the seaborne craft attacking its bays and rivers were swarming clouds of bacteria.  Five grey warships, two of them aircraft carriers, formed a loose barrier for the activity out in the deeper water, and Dave could see clear lanes set up for two of them, bright red buoys creating a path from ship to shore.

The activity wasn’t limited to the water, it spilled onto the land, cars and trucks and tiny person-bugs scurrying about a landscape covered in far more grey and black than Dave would have expected to see in such a remote township.  The distinctive yellow of earthmoving equipment was visible everywhere.  Three huge rectangular blocks of buildings-in-progress stood out near the coastline.  Further inland, between the water and the busy airport, there were lower-profile developments, smaller structures built along roads both new and unformed, occasionally curling into a cul de sac.

Dave had seen enough of these kinds of developments to recognise them.  They were suburban neighbourhoods, freshly moulded out of the dirt.

Dave was already high above the ground, but he felt that he was at an impossible altitude and drifting further, beyond the reach of gravity.  This couldn’t be real.

‘What is this, Tom?’ Dave said.  His voice sounded flat in his ears.  ‘What is this all for?’

‘Where did all the
boats
come from?’ Jenny said.

Tom leaned in close to the window.  ’The big one on the left?  That’s RSS Persistence, Singaporean.  Then, moving right, it’s USS Antietem, HMAS Sirius, USS Pioneer, USS Michael Murphy.  The two frigates floating around just beyond the main harbour are Indonesian.’

‘Harbour?’ Dave said.

‘Well, maybe not yet,’ Tom said.  ‘But it will be.’

‘This isn’t about joint military exercises, is it?’

‘Joint, yes.  Exercises, no.’

‘So what are all the little boats?’ Jenny said.

‘A mix of commercial and civilian craft.  Fishing boats, ferries, passenger ships.’

‘Where are they from?’ Jenny said.

‘Oh, all over.  But many of them have come through Indonesia.  In the past, they would have been called
boat people
.’

‘What
past
are you referring to?’ Dave said, looking at his brother with a quizzical frown.

Tom shrugged.  ‘Yesterday, I suppose.’

‘And today?’

‘Today,’ Tom said, and took a deep breath, ‘they are provisional citizens of the Northern Australia Special Administrative Region.’

‘The what?’ Dave said.

‘NASAR.  It’s a ninety-nine year lease.’

‘To the US,’ Dave said.

‘Yeah.  We were thinking of selling it outright, but we decided a long lease would be an easier sell.’

‘
We
,’ Dave said.  ‘Who is
we
, exactly.’

‘Why, We the People,’ Tom said, hands held out to indicate:
everyone
.  ‘Represented by a desperate government, backed into a corner and no longer concerned with popular policy, but policy which
works
.’