Sensitive New Age Spy (2 page)

A travel writer once declared the world’s most beautiful harbour to be Sydney by day and Hong Kong by night, and you won’t get any argument from me. With a foreshore featuring well-kept parks, small secluded beaches and very expensive homes, Sydney Harbour’s main focus is a rough triangle made up of the elegant grey steel arch of the bridge, the Opera House, with its amazing sail shapes mimicking yachts on the harbour, and Kirribilli House – the Prime Minister’s palatial waterfront residence when he’s in town.

The PM’s joint, a gabled, federation mansion fronting onto the water, has beautifully manicured grounds and panoramic harbour views from the front porch, taking in the Royal Australian Navy’s base at Garden Island, and Fort Denison. Originally known as Pinchgut, Fort Denison was renamed in the 1850s when it was fortified with a stone Martello tower armed with muzzle-loading cannon. The fortifications were
designed to protect Sydney from a Russian invasion that fortunately never eventuated.

The police launch dropped me on the Fort Denison jetty just a few minutes after seven. It felt like we’d broken the world water-speed record to do it, and now I had a touch of seasickness to contend with, as well as a hangover. A bunch of cops were already on the island, among them Detective Inspector Peter Sturdee, acting State/Federal Special Liaison Officer. Sturdee was pacing the paved forecourt, and looked like he was anxious to start specially liaising. He waved off the young uniformed walloper on the dock who wanted to see some ID and have a quick sniff through my camera bag.

‘So what have we got here then, Pete?’ I said.

‘Buggered if I know, and that’s the problem. Come and have a look.’

He walked quickly across the forecourt, leading me past old barracks rooms and up a well-worn stone stairway to a courtyard surrounded by parapets with firing steps and more million-dollar views. A flagpole and a battery of small, muzzle-loading cannon stood at one end of the courtyard, and the massive bulk of the Martello tower dominated the other. Everyone else with an interest in the proceedings was gathered in a gaggle on top of the tower, gazing up at the bow of one hell of a big ship. She had looked pretty imposing from a distance, but up close she was gigantic.

I slipped my sunglasses into my pocket, walked across the courtyard and climbed up on one of the firing steps to
get a better look. With the uniformed cop back on the jetty well out of earshot and the rest of the plainclothes cops up on the tower, Peter and I could talk freely. Plainclothes was right – very bloody plain. Sturdee was the only detective I knew who didn’t look like he’d just fallen out of a tumble drier.

‘Around seventy, maybe eighty thousand tonnes,’ he said, staring up at the ship. ‘Or so the Water Police boys reckon.’

‘And you’ve got no idea what the hell’s going on?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

I glanced back past the Opera House and the bridge pylons to Millers Point and the harbourmaster’s control room, a circular, glass-sided observation deck on top of a ninety-metre, reinforced-concrete support column. It gave the duty officer a 360 degree, bird’s-eye view of Sydney’s maritime traffic.

‘Someone asleep at the switch up there?’ I said.

‘They had their hands full with a blackout. Radar and video surveillance systems went down, along with the backups, about the same time our visitor there would have been coming in through the Heads.’

‘That was convenient. And no one got a visual fix?’

‘Like I said, they had their hands full.’ Sturdee shrugged. ‘Plus the tanker had no lights showing and it’s a new moon, which meant a lot of the harbour was dark.’

‘So we have to assume it’s not an accident. The captain wasn’t just as drunk as a skunk and decided to pull her over to the kerb and sleep it off till morning.’

‘Doesn’t look like it. The Sydney Ports blokes reckon it would have needed an ace pilot who really knew the harbour to get her to this point in the dark, so someone understood exactly what they were doing. They – whoever
they
are – wanted her anchored right here.’

Dammit. Why had Julie gone and answered that bloody phone?

‘Your blokes spotted anyone on board yet?’ I asked.

‘Nope. I’m organising a chopper to do a low-level sweep over the top.’

‘So no demands, threats, anonymous phone calls claiming responsibility?’

‘Not a peep, so far.’

That would probably change soon. No one would pull a stunt like this just as a prank.

‘Jesus, what a mess,’ Sturdee groaned. ‘It’s a public holiday, weather’s perfect, and there’s a ferry race scheduled for the afternoon, so naturally the harbour was going to be the destination of choice for everything that floats. Great bloody timing.’

He was right about that. The timing of all this was just too neat.

‘I’ve declared a full emergency,’ he continued, ‘and we’ve started diverting all city-bound bridge and tunnel traffic out towards the western suburbs. I’ve also set up a total exclusion zone, air and sea, and I’ve closed the bridge and shut down the bridge climb.’

I was impressed. ‘You can do all that?’

‘Damned if I know, but I did it anyway. I still haven’t been able to raise anyone senior at HQ, and nobody at the security services is answering. If Julie hadn’t picked up your phone I’d be out here all on my lonesome.’

‘I guess you drew the short straw on weekend duty?’ I said.

‘Worse than that, I volunteered – wanted the overtime. What can I tell you.’ Peter’s wife had recently produced a second set of twin boys and the Sturdee household needed every penny it could get. ‘But I figured I’d just be spending the weekend at a desk with my feet up.’

‘Bit of a bad call,’ I said.

‘Tell me about it.’ He glanced across the harbour in the direction of Kirribilli House. ‘Prime Minister’s apparently evacuating right now.’

‘Can’t say I blame him,’ I said. ‘When he’s finished and washed his hands maybe we should ask him to leave.’

Sturdee looked at me and shook his head, but I did get a smile out of him.

The sky was completely clear and you could feel the heat starting to build. It was shaping up to be one of those late-spring Sydney scorchers. I thought about grabbing the tube of 30+ sunblock from my camera bag, but changed my mind – a bloke wouldn’t want to look like a wuss in front of all those
butch coppers. Besides, I figured that right at the moment the tanker and its contents were potentially a lot more hazardous to my health.

‘And if I didn’t already have enough on my bloody plate,’ Sturdee said, ‘there’s that.’ He looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the Woolloomooloo wharves.

‘That’ referred to the bristling array of antennae rising above the Garden Island naval dockyard, indicating the presence of a United States Navy Ticonderoga-class Aegis battle cruiser, the USS
Altoona
. According to the not-for-publication briefing all the security agencies had received, the
Altoona
had been extensively refitted, with an extended stern wedge to improve fuel efficiency at cruising speed, new reduced-cavitation propellers, and an upgrade to the Baseline 7.5b Aegis Weapons System. Right now she was on a shakedown cruise, and the Sydney stopover was a long-scheduled goodwill visit.

In the old days, a Navy cruiser was a tad smaller than a battleship but faster, with lighter armour and bloody big guns. Modern cruisers are small by comparison, still very fast, and they mount just one dinky little five-inch gun, if they’re lucky. Ships like the
Altoona
made up for this with Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Stinger infrared surface-to-air missiles, Penguin and Hellfire air-to-surface missiles for the onboard helicopters, and Phalanx rapid-firing guns or Sea Sparrow missiles for close-in defence. Chuck in some nuclear-capable Tomahawk cruise missiles, and one modern cruiser packed
as much punch as a whole World War II aircraft-carrier battle group. It was about as close as you could get to a floating Death Star.

On the raised helipad at the stern of the warship, I could just make out the shape of an SH 60R Seahawk helicopter, its rotor blades slowly turning, and sailors going about their business.

Sturdee turned back towards the tanker. ‘The Navy are sending a work boat over from HMAS
Waterhen
with some clearance divers so we can take a closer look at our visitor.’

‘Sounds sensible.’

‘And naturally the Yanks on the cruiser are a bit edgy about all this. The captain sent over his executive officer and a couple of specialists to have a look-see. They’re up on the tower, ready to give us any assistance we might need.’

Having a ship anchor unexpectedly within spitting distance of your poop deck would make any Navy man worth his salt nervous. I looked up at the tower. Amid our very plainclothes cops, the three Americans in neatly pressed khaki stood out like nuns in a brothel. Not as much as the crewcut CIA man in rust-red chinos and the Hawaiian shirt, though – talk about standing out like dog’s balls.

‘Lonergan’s up early,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Navy blokes must have given him a shout.’

Carter Lonergan was the new CIA Chief of Station in Australia. His predecessor had copped a full magazine from an M4 carbine in the chest, in a nasty incident at the top-secret
US satellite facility at Bitter Springs last February. The same incident saw me catching that bullet in the shoulder, blowing up the base, shooting my boss dead, and getting arrested and then promoted all in the same week. Probably not a career-advancement pathway they teach at the Harvard School of Business, but I could be wrong about that.

‘I don’t suppose Mr Lonergan has informed you whether yonder symbol of American might is carrying nuclear warheads for its cruise missiles?’ I said.

‘You know how it goes, Alby. “We are unable to confirm or deny the presence of…” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

Same old same old. Not all American warships carried nuclear weapons all the time, and the Yanks had a policy of keeping you guessing.

‘Anyway,’ Sturdee said, ‘I thought you’d know, if anyone did.’

That was a joke. ‘I’m just the boss of an intelligence service,’ I said, ‘so nobody tells me nothin’. Got any binoculars?’

‘Fraid not. The caretaker had a pair but Lonergan borrowed ’em.’

I put my camera bag down, popped the clasps and pulled out my Nikon digital SLR with the 18-200 VR zoom. A quick scan of the tanker’s superstructure through the telephoto lens didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. I aimed the camera down and focused on the hull of the tanker.

‘Better have that Navy work boat keep well clear when it shows up, Peter.’

‘Yeah, what are those things?’ he asked, pointing at the hull. ‘They look like kids’ lunchboxes.’

At regular intervals around the hull, thin black rectangular boxes were suspended by wires, just a metre or so above the waterline.

‘They’re anti-personnel mines,’ I said. ‘Perimeter defence weapon. Russian MON 50s, I think, very similar to the American Claymore. Remotely triggered. Anyone gets too close and
bang
– they cop around five hundred high-velocity steel ball-bearings smack in the kisser. That work boat would end up looking like a piece of grey Swiss cheese. Same goes for the sailors in it.’

Sturdee turned white, grabbed for his radio and started talking very fast.

There was a rumble of boat engines from the direction of the jetty and a minute or so later a familiar voice asked, ‘Coffee?’

The cardboard tray held six styrofoam cups with lids. Julie was wearing Nike runners, shorts, a singlet top and a light bomber jacket. Only ten minutes behind me, yet she looked clean-scrubbed, fresh-faced, and there wasn’t a single blond hair out of place. And she’d managed to stop off and get coffee.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised. My second-in-command was what some might call an assertive driver.

‘I left your truck down by the Opera House,’ she said.

I took a coffee from the tray. ‘There’s supposed to be a total exclusion zone around here, you know.’

‘That might be so, but a winning smile and a dozen donuts can get a girl almost anywhere with the boys in blue.’

I sipped my coffee. It wasn’t very good coffee but it
was
coffee. Shame the cops on shore had snaffled all the donuts. I hadn’t had breakfast yet.

Peter Sturdee, who had turned round at the mention of donuts, finished his radio call and took a cup. ‘Thanks, Jules,’ he said. ‘Bit of a surprise you answering Alby’s phone. I thought maybe I’d dialled the office by mistake.’ There was a mischievous twinkle in his eye.

Julie smiled. ‘He made me dinner and plied me with wine in the hope of having his wicked way.’

‘Hey,’ I protested, ‘I only wanted to give my new stove a burl.’ Me and Julie and wicked ways was a concept I’d long since given up on.

‘Alby’s just had one of those swish, stainless-steel Smug super-kitchens installed,’ Julie said, putting down the tray of coffees.

‘I thought it was Smeg,’ Sturdee said.

‘You obviously haven’t talked to any of the bastards who own them.’

Sturdee started to smile, then his radio crackled and he turned away.

Julie stared up at the tanker, then across at the bridge and the Opera House, taking in the situation. ‘This looks like it has the potential to get a bit ugly,’ she said as she twisted the top off a Goodie orange juice.

I nodded. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

Sturdee’s radio conversation was brief. ‘Navy got the message, Alby,’ he said, turning back to us. ‘They’re keeping
well clear. And they’ve spotted some activity at the back end of the boat.’

‘That would be the stern,’ Julie said. ‘Of the ship.’

Sturdee looked at her.

‘North Narrabeen Sea Scouts,’ I said.

Sturdee took a sip of his coffee. ‘Anyway,’ he continued, ‘two bods in black ski masks just unfurled a banner. It says “Halifax” and the numbers “one nine one seven”.’

‘Jesus H. Christ!’

Sturdee and I both stared at Julie. She’s usually not one for religious profanity, though she can do an excellent line in straight-out obscenity if you push her enough.

‘My bet is it’s supposed to read 1917,’ she said.