Rogue Element

Parliament House, Canberra, 0500 Zulu, Wednesday, 29 April

The PM sat at his desk with his head in his hands. Losing such a close friend made him physically ache. And Harry’s entire family had perished with him. He wondered about the chances of surviving a plane crash. The only connection he’d had with such events in the past was, as for most people, through news reports. Do people walk away from such things? It occurred to Blight that the friends and family of the passengers aboard the Qantas flight were probably feeling every bit as confused as he was, switching between grief and hope. What if my own kids were aboard that plane? He was able to visualise their final moments filled with terror, and the picture almost made him feel ill.

Answers. Bloody answers, that’s what we need.

Qantas confirmed that the aircraft had crashed. The wreckage hadn’t been located yet but it had to have come down. It was only carrying enough fuel for the Bangkok leg and time was well and truly up.

The country was already in deep shock. There was disbelief on everyone’s face. Was this the work of terrorists again? That was Blight’s first thought, so it had to be everyone else’s too. Australia had once enjoyed the benefits of being isolated, a backwater. Then those days had come to a bloody end in a couple of tourist bars on his favourite holiday island. On some level attributing the plane’s disappearance to an act of terrorism made the situation easier to come to terms with. This was a Qantas plane and Qantas planes just did not crash. The thing couldn’t have come down for no reason, surely? Qantas had suffered some embarrassing ‘incidents’ in recent years, but the carrier’s unequalled safety record had been maintained, and so had the public’s faith in the carrier.

To lose a 747 was bad enough. To have no idea where it had come down made things a damn sight worse. Somewhere out there, four hundred people, many of them Australian citizens, were dead or dying of their injuries.

The Chief of the Defence Force, Ted ‘Spike’ Niven, tapped on the open adjoining door.

‘Come in, Spike,’ said the PM, motioning the country’s most senior officer towards the leather chesterfield opposite.

In his day, Niven had been one of Australia’s top fighter pilots. He had a mind that was relentlessly calculating, even under the stress of battle, and his hand — eye coordination was phenomenal. Blight had previously reviewed the man’s record. As a young flight lieutenant he’d been sent to the US by the RAAF as part of an exchange program. The RAAF wanted the best pilots and the US had the finest combat training programs, the most famous being the US Navy’s Top Gun Academy. The Australian proved an apt pupil. Once he’d come to grips with the extra power available from the American-specification F/A-18, Squadron Leader Ted Niven was unbeatable. No matter what the instructors threw at him, the Australian could find a winning answer. And if he got on your tail, he waxed it and you lost.

The Yanks gave him the call sign ‘Spike’. They joked that it had nothing to do with his flying — it was because once he had his teeth into you, he never let you go. The truth was that Niven looked disturbingly like Spike, the bulldog who featured in Warner Brothers’ Sylvester cartoons. His dark eyes were set wide apart on a square face with a small button-nose underlined by an aggressive jaw with a slight overbite. He was also short, barrel-chested, and had slightly bowed legs. Spike he had been christened, and Spike he had remained.

Niven’s tour of the States had been in the early eighties. Now, at forty-seven, he was the youngest-ever CDF. ‘Sorry for the intrusion, Prime Minister, but I have a thought on how QF-1 could be located quickly,’ he said, scowling. He’d just heard that one of the men from his former squadron had been a pilot on the ill-fated jumbo’s flight deck. Niven hadn’t met the man, but the connection still added a personal element to the tragedy. ‘I also think, if you don’t mind, that it’d be worthwhile bringing Graeme Griffin into the loop.’

Griffin was the Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, a man Niven could always rely on to play it straight. The two men had been to university together, played football together, and had even been out with a few of the same women.

‘Ahead of you there, Spike. Shirley?’ he said, raising his voice so it would carry over the thick carpet. ‘Could you get Graeme Griffin in here? And ask Phil Sharpe to come over too.’

Niven scowled again, this time intentionally. He couldn’t think of one issue he and Sharpe agreed on.

The PA appeared around the door. ‘Anything else?’

‘No thanks, mate,’ said Blight, treating the woman who’d been his PA for twenty years no differently to one of the boys.

The two men made small talk for a couple of minutes while they waited for Griffin and the Minister for Foreign Affairs to arrive, but the conversation was awkward. Both men wanted action, not talk, and were soon lost in the silence of their own thoughts.

Shirley hurried in with a jug of water and some glasses and left saying, ‘If you need anything, call.’

The Prime Minister nodded.

‘Prime Minister, Spike,’ Griffin said as he entered the office and sat beside the CDF. The ASIS chief was tall and wiry with hard blue eyes softened by deep laugh lines at the corners. He wore his grey hair cropped short, military style.

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Phil Sharpe, followed, settling comfortably into a chair under the window. He ran his hands through the thick, mouse-coloured hair that hung down his tanned forehead like rope, repositioning it back on top of his head. He affected a hint of a smile, as if he’d just shared a witticism at someone else’s expense before entering the room. Niven and the minister didn’t get on. Neither man knew why, it was just chemistry, or lack of it. Griffin and Sharpe shook hands and were cordial to each other — ASIS answered to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Niven noted that, as usual, Sharpe wore an imported, dark navy suit and a hard white shirt. His tie had been chosen to make a statement. On other occasions, Niven had joked to himself that the statement was probably something like, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m an arsehole.’ The CDF caught a whiff of the man’s aftershave. It was the one he used. Niven made a mental note to pour the remains of his bottle down the sink.

‘Prime Minister, if I may start?’ asked the ADF chief. Blight nodded.

‘I’ve been doing some checking with both my own people and Qantas.’ He opened an atlas he had brought with him at the marked spread and pointed at Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago. He also pulled out a World Area Chart of Sulawesi, the kind of map aviators use to navigate visually over terrain. The track of the 747 had been drawn on the map with greasy red pencil. The track ended with a red cross. A semicircle, also drawn in red, about eight centimetres in diameter, fanned around from the X.

‘The X represents the approximate coordinates of QF-1 at about the time it disappeared from ATC screens, taking into account wind and other factors. We’re not exactly sure of the position because the Indons haven’t released the ATC disks that would give us the precise latitude and longitude. Nevertheless, our people are pretty sure of the plane’s position in the sky when it was reported to have gone missing.

‘Now, the 747 will be somewhere within this circle. To suggest it might have come down elsewhere is ridiculous,’ he said quietly but firmly.

Niven studied the red track that ended in a cross on the map, and massaged his chin in thought. ‘All kinds of different communications link 747s with various traffic control systems and satellites and there’s a shit-load of redundancy built in. These planes don’t just go missing. So when that traffic controller in Denpasar says QF-1’s transponder code went out, along with all its communications gear, well… I hate to say it, but there are a few things capable of doing that and most of them make a nasty mess of an aircraft when they go off.

‘There is the remotest possibility that QF-1 could have been flying out of control in a wide but decreasing downward spiral, which is why I’ve drawn in this semicircle here,’ he said, pointing to the pencilled area on the WAC. ‘Whether it blew up in the sky or crash-landed, QF-1’s somewhere here.’ He tapped the X marked on the map with his index finger.

‘I’m not sure what your point is, Spike,’ Sharpe said. ‘We’re in Indonesia’s hands. It’s their territory, and they do have the men and equipment needed to locate the crash site. It’s frustrating but we’ll just have to wait and see what they turn up. Also, let’s not forget that the plane only went down,’ he checked his watch, ‘maybe eight hours ago, so we can hardly accuse them of dragging the chain. Then there’s the terrain it went down in. Sulawesi is not a very hospitable place; most of it’s covered in jungle and volcanoes.’

Griffin agreed. ‘A fair percentage of the island has been logged but there are still quite a few impenetrable pockets. It’s the proverbial haystack.’

Sharpe nodded.

Niven was undeterred. ‘All of which adds weight to my view. I want to ask the US to use one of their military satellites to scan the area I’ve indicated on the WAC. I can’t believe the Indonesians would object to that. If we scanned five nautical mile segments, there’d be enough resolution to see a crashed 747 and cover around one hundred square miles in only twenty passes. The satellites I’m talking about have a two-hour period, so the entire area would be covered in around forty hours.

‘And there was a lot of fuel on board the aircraft. Ground fires in this area would show up like searchlights on infrared film.’

Blight winced as the picture of people burning in firestorms flashed through his mind.

‘Good idea. We might even find the site on the first or second pass,’ said Griffin.

‘Exactly,’ said Niven. ‘As I said, the Indonesians could hardly object. It would save them a hell of a lot of money and, of course, get the plane found as quickly as possible. Good for them. Good for us. Everyone wins.’ Niven’s enthusiasm was infectious.

‘Alright,’ said the PM. ‘If there’s one thing I hate, it’s sitting around on my arse. Our ambassador in Washington can handle the liaison.’

‘Okay, so what about the question of terror?’ Niven asked. It was the thought on all their minds.

‘What about it?’ said Sharpe.

‘I jumped to that conclusion too, Spike, but so far there’s not a shred of evidence to support it,’ said Griffin.

‘And aside from that, terror just doesn’t feel right,’ said Blight, rubbing his temples. ‘Not on this one. It’s all too quiet. Terrorists make grand media statements, don’t they? The USS Cole, the Pentagon, New York, Bali, that awful strike in London. A plane going down in the middle of the night, just disappearing like this… does it fit the terrorist model?’

‘I know, Prime Minister, I don’t want to believe the worst either, but until we hear otherwise, we can’t eliminate it completely, can we?’ Niven had national defence issues to consider and he wasn’t going to turn his back on them.

‘Christ,’ Blight said, frowning. ‘I guess not.’ The PM had slumped into a ball behind his desk. He was short and thickset, his body fashioned by thirty years of hard labour on the waterfront. Large hands with fingers like sausages spoke of physical power, and his skin was leathery from the sun. Until recently, a robust belly had hung over his belt, the product of years of supporting local breweries, but the minders had worked on him for the sake of his television profile, employing trainers to reduce it.

The press called him ‘Bloody-hell Blight’, or ‘Blue Blight’, for his love of colourful language, and that was one characteristic the spin doctors had been unable to change. The average man in the street loved him for it, though. He was human, a welcome change from the years of cocky conservatism.