Milkshake (23 page)

“A what?”

“Warrant of fitness, like the MOT back home, shows she’s safe
and roadworthy.”

David feigned his best startled look, He was familiar with the
warrant, having checked all the red tape before even considering
bringing his beloved Triumph with him, but he had to fake complete
ignorance if the plan was to work. “Any chance you can lend me a
bike? Sorry, I didn’t realise I needed to do all this and, to be
honest, I completely forgot the bike wouldn’t just be ready to ride
away straight out of the container. The thing is I promised my wife
I would sort out some sort of accommodation by the time she arrives
tomorrow, so I need a set of wheels to get around. No point hiring
a car when there’s a perfectly good 650 straining at the
leash.”

David had successfully pushed all the right buttons. There was
no hesitation from Greg in agreeing to lend him a late model Suzuki
for three days.

David signed the paperwork and Greg directed him to the
nearest filling station. He sped away, exhilarated. On a New
Zealand registered bike, the helmet and borrowed leather jacket
completing the cloak of invisibility, for now, he was
free.

* * *

The official website of the New Zealand Security Intelligence
Service states:

Established in 1956. Prior to that, national security was
taken care of by a branch of the police, except for a brief period
during the Second World War.

During the period 1939 to 1945 the British Government took a
lead from their American Allies. It’s now widely known the United
States recruited native speaking Indians into special units within
the army and navy, using their language and tracking skills to run
covert operations within both Europe and the Pacific
regions.

At that time there had been very little study into these
unique and obscure dialects, and the American Indian soldiers were
able to freely transmit important intelligence about enemy
movements and send coded messages from the battlefront back to
their commanders, simply by speaking to each other in their own
language, using their field radios.

The British searched their dwindling Empire for subjects with
similar skills and soon realised they enjoyed the loyalty of the
native New Zealand Maori people. They too possessed a fierce
warrior spirit, legendary tracking skills and a spoken language
largely incomprehensible to the rest of the world, and in
particular the axis powers of the northern hemisphere.

The skills of the American Indians were used in the South
Pacific islands, geographically New Zealand’s closest neighbours.
Here Japanese commandos were known to be landing by submarine in
order to gain intelligence necessary for any potential invasion
which may be launched against Australia or New Zealand.

Suitable Maori soldiers were recommended by their commanding
officers, to join the elite Z Force. Nowadays this sounds more like
a creation of Marvel Comics. In reality It was a joint British, New
Zealand and Australian commando force which carried out over 280
covert operations in the South Pacific theatre during World War
Two.

When the war ended, the Intelligence Service was once again
absorbed back into the New Zealand Police. An exclusive unit of
fifteen Maori marines, highly trained, highly motivated and a
valuable asset, were retained as a solely Kiwi version of Z Force;
a secret unit, within the Army.

When the NZSIS was established in 1956 Z Force changed its
name to Te Kowhiti Matauranga Tuke, roughly translated as special
knowledge service, or KMT Division. The use of the Maori language
was unusual in the white 1950s New Zealand, but reflective of the
strong tradition which had already built up in the
Division.

To this day, the KMT has only ever operated with a maximum of
fifteen personnel at any one time, recruiting its elite membership,
by discrete invitation only. Their skills are exploited in covert
operations around the world and their cultural knowledge and
appearance helps them blend in, when required, on their home soil.
Since 1945, the KMT have been involved in operations in both the
Korean and Vietnam wars, as well as back home, most notably during
the now infamous Springbok tour in 1981.

This tour by an all white South African rugby team took place
at a time when apartheid was still an integral part of South
African society, yet reviled by the majority in the western world.
Despite international condemnation, New Zealand allowed the
whites-only team to tour the country, sparking a fury of protest
never before seen in this small pacifist island nation and catching
the Government of the time off guard, badly misjudging the mood of
its people, misinterpreting tolerance for acquiescence.

During the tour, the KMT had one of their own in the New
Zealand All Blacks rugby squad, acting as a clandestine liaison
between the hapless players and the security forces trying to
protect them.

The KMT takes great pride in the fact that their small elite
division number just fifteen, coincidentally the same number as in
a rugby team, the beloved national game of New Zealand.

The Acronym KMT is recognised in Egyptology as the shortened
version of ‘kmet’ the name the ancient Egyptians gave to Egypt.
Literally translated it means ‘Black Earth’ or ‘Black
Land’.

As much as they love their country, and their rugby, the KMT
take quiet satisfaction in this happy linguistic coincidence. They
consider themselves to be the true All Blacks, protectors of all
the people of New Zealand/Aotearoa, whether Maori or white
‘pakeha’, and the soil beneath their feet.

* * *

Captain Brent Piri joined the New Zealand Army straight from
Auckland Boys College where he captained the first fifteen rugby
team and excelled academically.

His forebears had fought against the first European settlers
in the so-called musket wars. His great-grandfather, Maui Piri, had
been part of the Maori Pioneer Battalion Force and fought at
Gallipoli in World War One. The Maori fighting spirit was in his
blood. He was proud of his heritage and fiercely patriotic. Brent’s
superiors had recognised the young soldier’s
mana tangata
, his leadership skills,
early on and knew that, given the right nurturing, he would have a
future in the KMT.

So he was more than a little surprised some years later when
his first overseas assignment as a Captain found him in the
northern hemisphere summer of 2002, a stinking mop in his hand,
cleaning the restrooms in Terminal Four at Heathrow
Airport.

The briefing at Waiouru Army Camp had been concise. Fly to
London; make your way to the safe flat in Earls Court, then liaise
with the contact in the personnel department of Airclean Services.
They would provide work for two cleaners at Heathrow. He would be
given a file of photographs. The aim would be to confirm the
identity of each of the targets as they moved through the
Terminal.

This seemed an impossible task, given the tens of thousands of
people who passed through the Terminal each day, although he did
have assistance from an unlikely, but officially sanctioned,
source.

During the summer of 2002, the production crew from the
film
Love Actually
had been given permission to install high quality video
cameras in the arrival and departure halls at Terminal Four. The
intention was to capture the emotional greetings and farewells of
unsuspecting members of the public and to use some of the best
footage under the end credits of the film.

To avoid too much disruption and cabling, six cameras had been
set up, each beaming images to a hard drive recorder installed in
the boot of a car parked nearby. At the end of each day, a member
of the film crew would plug a laptop into the recorder and transfer
the raw data which would eventually be edited down into the final
four minute sequence.

An NZSIS officer on duty at the Air New Zealand check-in desk
had noted the installation of these cameras, as had a number of
other agents whose cover was the uniform of their own respective
national airline. They all had the same concern; that their
country’s agents, entering or leaving the country, could
potentially find themselves unwitting extras in a major movie
production.

Back at Waiouru, Piri’s commanding officer scanned his copy of
the weekly intelligence report from London and realised that, with
some assistance from Tech Ops, they could probably tap into the
wireless feed from the film company’s cameras, giving them not only
the eyes of Piri and, on the opposite eight hour shift, his
compatriot, Maaka, but also pictures from the cameras positioned in
the departure lounge.

The day after the cameras had been installed, a Tech Ops
officer from the New Zealand Embassy spent fifteen minutes sitting
in the departure lounge coffee shop, sipping cappuccino and working
on his laptop, hacking into the wireless camera feeds and uplinking
them via a microwave transmitter placed inside one of the Air New
Zealand check-in computers, back to the Embassy, in Central London.
Here, the footage was fed through new facial recognition software
developed by a team at Dunedin University and lent to the New
Zealand Immigration Department for evaluation.

A face passed in front of the camera. The image was sent from
Terminal Four to the Embassy, and then through the software, which
checked the facial image matching it to any known targets already
held in its database. The image, the target’s name and GPS position
were then sent straight back to the airport by text message, to be
received by the phone in Brent’s or Maaka’s pocket. This was
supposed to take no more then fifteen seconds

By the time the phone beeped, the target had usually walked no
more than twenty metres past the camera. The message indicated
which camera had taken the shot and the direction in which the
target was walking.

Both officers had practised using unsuspecting members of the
public. Over several weeks they had managed to perfect the
‘eyeball’ within a minute of the person passing any one of the
three cameras. Once actual visual contact was made, their job was
to confirm the target’s intended airline, flight and departure
gate.

Both agents had been working at the airport for eight days.
The modified phone which they shared for eight hours at a time had
not beeped once, except during practice runs. When they finally got
a ‘live’ message, they expected to find themselves following a
target to the departure gates of one of the three airlines that
flew into New Zealand from London.

Neither officer knew why they had to identify particular
targets. They had only discussed why KMT officers had been given
such a mundane surveillance task. After a few days cleaning
restrooms and emptying rubbish bins, the conclusion was, having
noted the other employees of Airclean Services, they simply had the
right skin colour for the job.

The New Zealand Immigration Service was concerned. In the
weeks immediately following the events of 11 September 2001, their
website was getting fifteen thousand hits a day. This in itself was
not surprising, given the country’s staunch anti-nuclear policy and
overt pacifist stance. People simply saw it as a potential safe
haven in a time of world crisis.

Within six months, the torrent of website hits was beginning
to translate into a steady stream of applications for residency
visas. The High Commission in London alone was receiving seven
hundred applications per week. The interest in New Zealand as a
preferred emigration destination was further heightened by the
release of the first in a trilogy of movies based on Tolkein’s
‘Lord of the Rings’, in December 2001, just three months after
9/11. The film, shot entirely on location in New Zealand, had
grossed forty seven million dollars in its opening weekend in the
US alone, and had served as a three hour travelogue, showing the
stunning and varied scenery of both islands on a scale never before
appreciated by such a huge worldwide audience.

The Immigration department was caught on the back foot by so
much sudden serious interest in the country and simply did not have
the capacity to deal with the flood of residency applications. They
sought assistance. Victoria University’s Sociology Department
agreed to work with the Census Office, filtering out applicants at
an early stage who were unlikely to be granted residency. They did
this by compiling a profile of the ‘ideal’ New Zealander using link
analysis software being developed by the Department as a result of
their research into social network analysis theories.

The first set of results, based on data from their London
Embassy and presented a month later, was unexpected and
startling.

According to the statistics, eighty-five percent of the UK
applicants between September 2001 and January 2002 lived within a
seventy five mile radius of the capital city, not a surprising
statistic in itself, given that London has the largest population
of any city in the United Kingdom. From the fifteen hundred
applications processed, nine hundred and forty-five came from two
very specific areas. In twelve cases they found multiple
applications from the same street. It was as if a significant
proportion of the applicants knew each other, almost as if the
decision to emigrate to New Zealand had become a word of mouth
phenomenon.