Underground (20 page)

A noise arose in the night, the distant drone of a helicopter.

We stared about—and there, low on the horizon, a light was lifting into the sky. We watched, transfixed, as it rose higher and soared almost directly above us, rushing into the north.

‘What do we do?’ I asked.

‘We walk.’ Harry pointed south. ‘Out there.’

‘But do you know where we’re going?’

‘Not a damn clue.’

And so we set off into the desert.

What did I say about not being an Outback person?

Okay, so I’m not even sure that a few thousand square miles of sand and scrub somewhere in the south-west corner of New South Wales
is
the Outback . . . But it sure felt like it to me. Especially as we set out into the middle of it, the sand still warm under our feet from the heat of the day, and our only landmark a dead Humvee behind us in the night. We had a mere scrap of food and a drop of water on which to survive, and we were alone in a place so big and empty that we could wander there until we collapsed and died, and our bodies might not be found by another passing soul for months—for
years
. To me, that was alien. That was scary. I felt more helpless and trapped in those first few miles of walking than I had in the back of the Australia Post van after my initial kidnapping.

Ah, but the sky! It’s true what the brochures say, after all. In my entire life, I don’t think I’ve ever spent a night so
completely away from man-made lighting. There wasn’t even the glow from some distant town beyond the horizon, or the shining of a single illuminated window in a lonely farmhouse. The world was a great grey shadow, unbroken—except for a flicker that came and went in the east, and that was only lightning shimmering amongst the tops of far-off storm clouds. A hundred miles or more over there it might be thundering and raining in the hills, but out in the desert the sky was clear. Just the warm evening breeze, the silence, and the stars.

And satellites. Glittering pinpricks, crossing far above us. Every time I glanced up in the early hours after sunset, my feet stumbling on the black ground, there seemed to be one moving stealthily up there. Military, civilian, who knew, but they were like an itch, like lice crawling about the globe, because they too were the enemy now. Spying eyes in the sky. It wasn’t until the night deepened, and the satellites were no longer visible, that I could look up and simply see . . . well, the universe. Not so much something that was
above
me, it was more like I was walking upside down on a huge ceiling, and there was an immense gulf below into which I could fall, eternally, if the vertigo made me let go of my grip on the earth and launch off.

Ha! But maybe that’s just an Australian thing, or a Southern Hemisphere thing, anyway—the arse-end hemisphere, to paraphrase Mr Keating. We’re all down-under here, supposedly, clinging to the bottom side of the planet. In the meantime, the sky had more mundane uses, like navigation, and working out which way was south. Me, I just would have walked towards the Southern Cross.

‘You’d be wrong,’ Harry corrected. ‘If you did that all night, you’d end up walking in a giant curve, because the cross describes an arc in the sky every evening. To head directly south, you take the long arm of the cross and extend an imaginary line from it downwards. Then you find the two pointers—those two bright stars a bit below the cross—and extend another
imaginary line upwards from them, perpendicular to, and bisecting, the line between the pointers themselves. Where your two imaginary lines cross, that’s true south.’

I took his word for it. He would know, after all, being in the Underground, and with the Southern Cross being their symbol—the five stars and the ‘Free Australia’ slogan.

‘It’s always upside down though,’ I said to Harry as we stomped along, side by side, Aisha a white ghost behind.

‘What is?’

‘The Southern Cross. Whenever you guys leave it as a calling card, you draw it upside down, not right way up.’

He glanced at the constellation in question. ‘Some people thought we should use it upright. Problem is, the Southern Cross has been used by dozens of little protest movements over the years, and we are
not
some little protest movement. We’re about a complete overthrow of everything. So we flipped it.’ He strode on in silence for a time, staring up. ‘Anyway, it’s not always upright in the sky, is it?’

‘How did it happen?’ I asked.

‘Sorry?’

‘You. All this Underground stuff. It’s a long leap from hired gun for the Department of Citizenship to resistance fighter.’

‘It was called Immigration back then, not Citizenship. Anyway, I worked for a private company that specialised in prisons and remand centres.
They
were the ones who were employed by the Department.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘The chain of responsibility, that’s what.’ He grinned briefly in the dark—his cynicism baring its fangs. ‘If the company happens to brutalise the inmates, well, that’s got nothing to do with the government, has it? Deniability.’

‘So did you work in the actual detention centres?’

He hesitated a fraction. ‘Yes.’

‘Which one?’

‘Woomera.’

‘Ah . . .’

You won’t know this, dear interrogators, but Woomera—that’s a name to strike dark and complex emotions in the Australian psyche. A faint echo, perhaps, of what it might be like to mention Auschwitz to a German. Our most notorious detention camp, operating back in the early days after September 11, when the walls first went up and illegal immigrants from Islamic countries became public enemy number one. It was a pretty tame place, of course, by today’s standards, and long since closed down. But Woomera was at the start of it all.

‘I was just a prison guard once,’ Harry went on, ‘working in state institutions. But then, when the whole boat people thing blew up and all the new detention centres came on line, the call went out for staff. People like me with prison experience were high on the wanted list. It was more money than I was getting in the state system. So I took a contract.’

From behind us, Aisha spoke up. ‘It was Woomera that made me become an activist. It was a war crime against the Muslim people.’

Harry glanced back. ‘You couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old.’

‘I knew right and wrong when I saw it.’

‘I didn’t think it was wrong. Not at first. The people there had entered the country illegally. We couldn’t just let them wander about in any way they liked. They had to be processed. We had to work out who was a legitimate refugee, and who wasn’t. So in the meantime, yes, if they were detained somewhere comfortable for a while, where was the harm?’

‘Somewhere comfortable?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘That was the problem, of course. I’d worked in prisons, and the point of prisons is that they’re supposed to be places of both detention and punishment, because the people in them have committed serious crimes. A detention centre is
just supposed to be a temporary holding location, it’s not supposed to be punitive. The only crime the people there have committed is to cross a border without paperwork, which legit refugees are allowed to do anyway. But Woomera was the most punitive place I’d ever seen. Murderers and rapists got far better treatment than the men, women and children in Woomera did.’

‘I heard it was pretty hard on the staff, too.’

He shrugged. ‘The whole place was a nightmare. Lack of funds, lack of equipment, incredible heat, no shade, tin sheds, way out in the desert, a place designed for four hundred people holding nearly fifteen hundred. Then the Immigration Department stalled on the refugee applications and left us all there to rot. As far as I could tell, the unwritten understanding between the government and the company was just to make the detainees suffer—as an example to any future boat people who might want to come. After all, John Howard had sworn in public that no more illegals were getting in, hell or high water.’

‘I remember,’ I said.

‘Everyone remembers. It’s not as if it was a secret. But I saw it first-hand—innocent people, the vast majority of them completely genuine refugees escaping from regimes like Saddam and the Taliban—and this country punished them as if they
were
Saddam and the Taliban. You’ve got no idea what it was like to watch those people—who thought they’d found safety—gradually realise that they were even worse off than before. The way the hope turned into bewilderment, and then anger, and then just blank despair. So of course there was violence in the camp. Protests, hunger strikes, suicide attempts. The staff were helpless to stop it. And meanwhile the government was crowing: ‘See? We told you these illegals were savages!’

‘What was your job exactly?’

‘Oh, I was just camp security. Manning the perimeter. It was harder for the medical staff—they really saw the worst. Me, I just had to keep the inmates in, and any intruders out.
And intruders meant virtually everyone. Journalists. Legal Aid. United Nations inspectors. In the end, it started to get to me. I’d never had trouble in my old job. Crims were crims. But this . . . I mean, of course we had the right to control who entered the country. Even to send illegals back. But in the meantime, they were human beings. To deliberately neglect, imprison and dehumanise several thousand innocent people, little children included, over periods of years, simply to scare everyone else away . . . That we did
not
have the right to do.’

‘Even though it worked? The boats stopped coming.’

‘Oh, it worked all right. At least as far as most of the voters were concerned, come the next election. But not for me. After a year or so in that place—after seeing what this country was doing to people who had dared beg us for help—well, I’d walk around in a normal town or city and it all seemed surreal. It still
looked
like Australia. Sunny and warm and friendly, everyone going about their lives. But it was bullshit. I’d go back to Woomera, and see the filth and the insanity and the kids turned into zombies, and to me, that was the
real
Australia.’

‘It was because they were Muslims,’ Aisha intoned.

Harry waved a weary hand. ‘Sure. Probably. Although some of the poor bastards converted to Christianity in there. Fat lot of good it did them.’

I said, ‘Did you quit?’

‘Not exactly. Do you remember the big break-out from Woomera?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘That’s where it all began for me. Of course, there were always a few protests from the community outside about what was going on. There were marches and picket lines, even way the hell out there at Woomera. It was part of my job to secure the camp against them—although usually the government flew in extra South Australian police, or the AFP. Water cannons and the lot. But finally there was that one really big protest,
and in all the running battles, someone got to the fence with wire-cutters, or threw them over the fence to the inmates—and the next thing you know, the fence is down and inmates are running everywhere, mixing in with the protesters.’

TV images surfaced in my mind, old footage I hadn’t really paid much attention to at the time—dust, and a fence buckling, and figures running, leaping.

‘Complete chaos,’ Harry said. ‘The last thing I remember was some Immigration arsehole yelling at me to do something—to stop them, to shoot over their heads, maybe even to shoot
at
them, I dunno. But I just stood there stock-still for a minute and saw the raw joy on those people’s faces. The ones escaping. It wasn’t like you might see from a regular prisoner during a jailbreak. There was nothing furtive about it, nothing half-smart or clever. This was sheer liberation. This was people escaping a death camp, people who suddenly had their lives back.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I dropped my gun and ran off with them.’

I gaped at him. ‘Bullshit.’

He laughed. ‘No. Seriously. I don’t know what came over me—but in that split second, I wanted to be just as free as they were. That’s what Woomera did to detainees and staff alike. It was a prison for all of us. And I wanted out. So I ran with them. Whooping, screaming, tearing off my uniform, hugging people I didn’t know. I kid you not, it was about the best sixty seconds of my life. Then I sobered up a bit, of course.’

‘Did you go back?’

‘Hell no. Next thing I knew I was bundled into the back of some old hippie couple’s car with two of the detainees, and we were racing hell for leather away from there. That’s when I began to wonder what the fuck I was doing. And what the detainees were doing, too—’cause they were really gonna be made to pay for something like this, once they were caught again. But it was impossible to worry too much. I mean, the
hippies were laughing and the detainees were grinning from ear to ear and it all seemed worth it, just for that moment.’

I searched my memory vainly. ‘How many got away?’

‘Thirty odd. Most of them, of course, didn’t get far—they just ran off into the desert until the police caught up with them. But a good few got smuggled off by the protesters, like I did. And that’s what really amazed me. Those protesters—they’d come organised for this. It wasn’t just an impromptu dash. They’d planned the escape, and now they had plans to keep the escapees hidden. Those hippies, for instance—they weren’t just any old fools. They had maps and supplies, and about fifteen k up the road they dropped me and the detainees in the desert, with instructions about where to go next. They couldn’t keep us in their car. They knew there’d be roadblocks going up on all the main roads even as we spoke.’

‘Didn’t they care that you were one of the guards?’

‘It threw them a bit, but they seemed to accept it. After all, I was half-naked by then and laughing like a maniac. It was the detainees I was more worried about. There we were suddenly, just the three of us running alone into the desert. Me, and two young Afghani guys. Now, they had no reason to trust me, let alone to like me. They could have told me to fuck off, they could have beaten the crap out of me and left me for dead. But they didn’t. Despite it all, they understood what I was doing. And so we pressed on to the next rendezvous.’