Underground (32 page)

‘It’s madness,’ Aisha insisted, flushed red.

‘Look around you. How mad is any of this?’

The air filled with the whine of aircraft engines. I looked up, and was surprised to see a small private jet crossing above us. Not a military transport, but a slender Gulfstream. One of the high-end luxury kind. This was something new. Harry raised his head above the rim of the ditch to watch it land.

‘It’s not enough, though,’ I said to his back. ‘It doesn’t explain why they want me and Aisha dead. If she was really working
for the government, even unknowingly, then why didn’t they just instruct her to let me go after I was kidnapped? Why go through the pretence of rescuing me in that ambush?’

‘That I don’t know,’ said Harry, without turning. ‘But take a look at this.’

I climbed up to join him.

The Gulfstream was ambling across the tarmac. And racing out to greet it was another cavalcade of black limousines.

‘This is more like it,’ Harry said. ‘This is someone important. Look. On the hoods of the cars. Those flags.’

I could see them. They were American. Fluttering bravely.

‘This we gotta see,’ he said.

And without another word, he was out of the ditch, and moving through the grass at a crouch.

‘Wait!’ I hissed after him, but he didn’t stop. I glanced back at Aisha.

She was frozen, her mind working. ‘It can’t be true.’

There was no time for this. ‘Why not?’

She stared at me. ‘Because we were
promised
!’ But I heard the doubt there—deep and terrible, now that it had been planted.

‘C’mon. We can’t lose Harry.’

I dragged her upright, and we followed Harry’s track through the grass.

No alarms sounded, no guards came running. We caught up with Harry behind some small sheds. Then together we crept on, slipping from building to building, until we found ourselves behind a large hangar. At the far corner was a jumbled pile of empty oil drums. We crept in amongst them and peered out through the gaps. The main terminal was close now, and between us and it, some airport workers were busy servicing a refuelling tanker. They were not ordinary ground staff. They all wore uniforms. They were soldiers. Australian Army.

The Gulfstream was parked a little further out on the tarmac. The limousines had lined up beside it, and men from the cars had arranged themselves along a red carpet that had been unrolled. Most of them were in black suits, and wearing sunglasses. A secret service security detail if I’d ever seen one.

Harry gripped my shoulder. ‘Look,’ he said softly. ‘There.’

He was pointing to the foremost man in the line. An older, heavily built individual, with a bull head, and a close-shaven scalp. The only one not wearing sunglasses.

‘Don’t you know who that is?’ Harry demanded.

‘I’ve seen him somewhere . . .’

‘It’s Carl Holbrook.’

‘Who?’

‘The US Ambassador to Australia!’

He was right. It was.

‘I knew it,’ Harry whispered. ‘The US had to be behind all this. There’s no other way it could work. But who the hell is he welcoming?’

The plane’s pressure door swung open. A step unfolded down, and men emerged from the interior. They were all Arabs, in flowing white robes.

‘Are they Saudis?’ Harry wondered. ‘Is it Saudi royalty?’

At my back I could feel Aisha squirming for a better position from which to see. The robed men formed a guard at the foot of the stairs, and the Americans still waited patiently, watching the doorway.

Then, after a pause, a last figure stepped out.

Harry’s hand fell from my shoulder. ‘Oh, fuck.’

It was a ghost. A vision. A tall man, slightly stooped, with a look about him of one prematurely aged. Plain peasant dress, a robe, a long wispy beard gone grey. Intent eyes, oddly peaceful, and a serene half smile on his lips. A face that had stared out from a billion television screens and newspaper front pages. A
man who couldn’t possibly be there. A man who was supposed to be dead . . . Just like I was.

‘The Great Hero,’ came Aisha’s voice behind me, choked.

‘Jesus Christ,’ Harry moaned faintly.

‘It’s not him,’ I found myself saying. ‘It can’t be him.’

And yet, sedately, bin Laden descended onto the tarmac. I was blinking. It looked like him, it had to be him, but it couldn’t be him. I knew that for a certainty. Not here. Not now. Stepping down from a plane into the Australian sunshine.

The American Ambassador strode forward to meet him.

‘You were right,’ breathed Harry in amazement, and I sensed (though I did not turn) that he was looking at Aisha. ‘You were fucking well right.’

On the tarmac, the two men came together. Each was smiling warmly. They shook hands. They bent their heads together in a moment of conversation.

Quiet laughter drifted across the concrete.

And then Aisha was up and running.

Harry made a despairing grab for her and missed. She was out in the open, sprinting madly towards the plane and the tableau of the two men, talking while their retinues stood by. She was past the refuelling truck before anyone saw her.

Screaming, ‘Osama! Osama!’

It was a cry that seemed to contain everything about her. Adoration, and fanatical hope, and the fulfilment of those long-suffering years she had dreamt of meeting him. Yes. But there was confusion too. Anger. And a raging question—how could this be? After all the other lies and deceptions, now, there at last, was the Great Hero himself, just as she had been promised. Only he was standing hand in hand, and cheek to cheek, laughing with a representative of the Great Satan.

‘Osama!’

The Ambassador glanced her way. So did bin Laden. And the Australian soldiers. And the Americans. And the Arabs.

There was a surprised beat of silence. Then the Arabs were reaching under their robes, and the Americans were reaching under their jackets. They all fell upon her in a flurry of limbs and guns, and the only amazing thing was that no shots were fired. When it was over, bin Laden and the Ambassador had been hustled safely aside, and Aisha was on her knees, held down at one shoulder by an American bodyguard, and at the other by one of the al-Qaeda men.

She was still screaming.

Bin Laden came strolling back. He stood before her, calm, and said something that I couldn’t hear. Aisha abruptly fell silent. And then . . .

Then they just
talked
. They were too far away for me to understand any of it, and Harry and I were too stunned to do anything but watch. But I could hear the soft insistence of bin Laden’s questions, and the fierce accusatory tone of Aisha’s replies. She was shaking her head throughout, struggling against her captors. Was the girl actually berating the terrorist leader? Was she reminding him that he was supposed to guide her into the united world of new Islam, not indulge in friendly chats with the American enemy? Was she the faithful disciple unmasking the false prophet? And if so, then what could bin Laden make of her in his turn? Who was this mad young woman, ranting about a new Islam of which I’m sure he’d never heard, let alone approved? Who was this Muslim who was no Muslim at all? And who was she to challenge
him
on matters of faith and holy war?

Whatever they said, and whatever Aisha told him, about herself, about the Great Southern Jihad, or about her pain and her betrayal, it lasted only a few minutes. By then, bin Laden was frowning with impatience. He turned questioningly to the US Ambassador. Holbrook had been speaking urgently on a
mobile phone, no doubt discussing Aisha’s appearance with some higher authority. Now he broke off the call and addressed bin Laden in a low voice. The terrorist leader replied, gesturing in annoyance. They both considered Aisha. Then the Ambassador was on his phone again, asking a last question. Finally he shrugged, looked at bin Laden and gave an indifferent nod.

The Great Hero didn’t hesitate. He issued a curt order to one of his men, who in response lifted a gun, put the barrel against Aisha’s tangled hair, and blew off the top of her head.

It was only then that one of the Americans shouted a sharp command, and pointed right to where Harry and I were still kneeling behind the drums, dumbstruck.

Suddenly there were jeeps racing towards us, and sirens wailing, and bodyguards and Australian soldiers running everywhere. Harry and I were running too, back along behind the hangar, even as bullets peppered the empty oil drums.

Of course, we were never going to be fast enough. Especially not me, with my leg. Harry was already ten yards ahead. He had his gun drawn. ‘The bastards!’ he was yelling, to himself as much as me. ‘The bastards!’ And despite everything I somehow had faith in him still, a belief that he would find a way out of this. That he would save us both again, one last time.

He cleared the hangar, and I heard shots. Harry spun suddenly, as if stung, his mouth open, his gun firing. More shots answered, and his face seemed to shatter, spraying red. Then he was a shapeless thing tumbling to the ground.

I stopped running. I limped out into the open, my hands in the air. A dozen different guns greeted me, and the stony faces of three nationalities.

‘Down on the ground, motherfucker,’ someone ordered.

I lay down, not far from Harry and the pool of blood beneath him. I watched his body heave and twitch a few times, and then stop.

They were not kind to me. But to be honest, I don’t remember much of the next twenty minutes. The kicks. The abuse. The body search. The questions. (And God knows, there were far more of them to follow, right, interrogators dear?) No, I was off in some faraway place of horror and sadness. Thinking about . . . Oh, I don’t know. The taste of beer on a hot day. Of how beautiful human bodies are, when they’re young and smooth and strong.

I won’t even try to explain.

Finally they dragged me, hands tied behind my back, across the tarmac towards the terminal. Yet another black limousine was parked there. They opened the doors, shoved me inside. I wasn’t alone. A man was waiting, sitting comfortably. Mature. Dressed in a superb suit, and shining leather cowboy boots. Lean and weathered of countenance. A wave of bountiful grey hair. And yet all of it spoiled by the left side of his face, which hung slack and twisted. And when he spoke, it was in a slightly slurred American accent, almost drunken. It hinted wistfully of the bayous, and of the warm humid evenings in the deep south.

‘Ah Leo,’ he sighed. ‘What a merry dance you’ve led us on.’

The limousine rolled smoothly through the Canberra streets.

Not that I knew where we were going. The American had slipped a hood over my head, so I sat in darkness, on plush leather, surrounded by the whisper of air-conditioning. I was aching and bloodied. But I was reviving a little too, because it seemed that, for the moment,
I
at least was not destined to die.

‘Why the hood?’ I croaked. ‘I’ve already seen all there is to see.’

I was sitting directly across from him, and could hear leather creak as he moved in his seat. Crossing his legs casually, I imagined. ‘That’s hardly true,’ he said. ‘Besides, I’m only acting under instructions.’

‘Ah.’ And didn’t that just excuse everything. ‘So who the fuck are you, anyway? I remember you. From back in Queensland. What are you? CIA? NSA?’

Amusement lilted in his voice. ‘Something like that.’

‘You got a name?’

‘You can call me Sam.’

‘As in Uncle?’

He laughed. Perfectly genuine and charming. ‘If you like.’

And God, I hate charm. I said, ‘We would have beaten you, you know. That day in Brisbane, the cricket, at the Gabba. Australia would have whipped your American arses, if that bomb hadn’t gone off.’

‘Oh, I know. Everyone knew. That’s why the bomb was set for the time it was. It’s one thing to promote US–Australian relations through sport, but no one wanted an embarrassment.’

I pondered that a moment, tasting blood on my lips. Fuck, I thought.

I said, ‘And how many people died?’

‘Hardly any.’

‘Was it
all
you guys? All the terrorist attacks we’ve had? All the kidnappings and assassinations these last two years? The whole fucking lot?’

‘Well, not
all
of it.’

‘Aisha’s group? The Great Southern Jihad? You ran them all along?’

‘Not me personally. Not even my government. That was worked from the Australian end. But generally speaking, yes.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t answer for a time. ‘Come on, Leo. You must know.’

And curse the bastard, I did.

‘Why Canberra though?’ I asked.

He chuckled. I pictured him staring out the windows, proudly. ‘The funny thing is, it was you Aussies who gave us the idea. Years and years ago. Do you remember it? Back in 2003? When George W. Bush came to visit?’

‘I was here.’

‘Really? So was I. And you were so
accommodating
, you Australians. You shut down the whole town for us. I was part of the security detail. And we liked what we saw.’

A long-ago conversation came back to me. ‘I met your President that day. Nathaniel Harvey. He wasn’t President then.’

‘You met Nate? Wonderful. Because this was his inspiration. He just couldn’t get over how convenient Canberra was. How secure. A nice, small, modern city, but off on its own, miles from anywhere else. Only three roads in or out. A place you could evacuate without fuss. A place no one would even miss.’

‘But
why
?’

‘It’s simple. We needed somewhere, Leo. A place away from all the troubles. I’m not just talking about the States here. Or Australia. I’m talking about all the major nations. And the major corporations too. All the players.’

‘A place to do what?’

I could tell he was smiling. ‘To run the world, I suppose.’

I laughed, felt blood in my mouth, spat it out. Which is a futile thing to do, when your head is wrapped in a hood.

‘No, seriously,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand how it’s been lately. You can’t get anything done anymore. Not in decent privacy. You try to hold an economic summit, and the venue gets overrun by protesters. You try to keep the oil flowing, and environmentalists and pacifists are rioting in the street. You try to put a motion through the United Nations, and a few tinpot dictatorships derail the whole thing. It’s unproductive. The only way to get results is to quietly gather the important people together and let them talk, away from the public.’