Dead and Kicking (2 page)

Cartwright glanced across the rice fields towards the tree line. ‘Maybe you’d better get your men back to a good place to lie up for the night. It’s getting late.’

‘What about you, major? Are you okay on your own out here?’

Cartwright smiled. ‘I’ll be just fine. No need for you to worry about me.’

The sergeant got his griping and grumbling charges back on their feet and into some semblance of a military formation and they moved off slowly in the direction they’d come from. The area where the Americans had been resting looked like a rubbish tip. Empty C-ration boxes and discarded cans littered the flattened rice stalks.

Cartwright waited until the patrol was out of sight and the last sounds of the unit’s radio had faded. The sun would be setting soon and he needed to prepare the night ambush position. After casually scanning the landscape one more time, he held his hands out at waist height and slowly raised them, palms up.

Seven men wearing jungle greens and draped in camouflage netting laced with foliage slowly emerged from the rice field, 7.62mm Browning self-loading rifles at the ready. Three of the men had been lying motionless and unseen less than two metres from the resting GIs. Cartwright pointed towards the west and the patrol moved out silently, keeping well apart and well away from the trail.

It was the moment I’d been waiting for. I took careful aim, framing the major in front, the seven men behind him, and the sun setting on the distant tree line. Timing is crucial in this sort of thing and I squeezed off a rapid-fire burst of eight shots just as the director yelled, ‘Cut! Print that take.’

Without even checking the LCD display on the back of my Nikon D3x, I knew I had the perfect image for the movie poster. Then I climbed out from under my cover of greenery, turned, caught my foot on a tree root and fell flat on my arse in front of the whole film crew.

Falling flat on your arse in front of a film crew can be embarrassing, but everyone was too busy, too tired or just too over the whole damned business of movie-making to notice. On the plus side, landing on my butt crushed whatever had been biting me. I scrambled to my feet, casually checking my camera and trying to look cool and unconcerned while all around me the organised chaos that is filmmaking continued.

A hair stylist and the make-up artist fussed over the actor playing the Australian major while assistant directors, both Aussie and Vietnamese, lined up the supporting actors and the gaggle of backpacker extras hired to play American soldiers, just in case we had to do one more take in the rapidly fading light.

The scene of the meeting of the Aussie major and the yank patrol would take up about three minutes in the movie but we’d been on location in the heat and humidity of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta since just past dawn and it was now pushing sunset. Those three minutes of screen time would be made up of various wide shots, mid shots and close-ups, plus things called reverses to show people talking back and forth, and it all took time to reposition lights, change camera angles and rehearse the action. Back in Australia, film editors would cut all this footage together, and hopefully their talent and the skill of our cinematographer would disguise the fact that the sun was to the right of the soldiers when they rounded the bend and on their left when they marched away an apparent couple of minutes later.

While I dusted myself off, the camera crew behind me were ‘checking the gate’ on the big Panavision movie camera, making sure there were no ‘hairs’ – minute slivers of film negative – or pieces of grit caught in front of the film that might ruin the image. When the focus puller called, ‘Gate clear,’ Damien Grant, the first assistant director, glanced over towards a balding, intense young man sitting under a big umbrella in a black canvas director’s chair with ‘Director’ stencilled in white paint on the back.

This was our director, a talented veteran of four gruelling years of film school, three video clips and a TV commercial for pet food where he’d forced an actor with thirty years’ experience and three AFI awards to repeat the line ‘It’s Woof-A-Licious’ seventy-four times until he felt the poor bastard had the intonation and delivery just right.

The director conferred intently with someone with a clipboard, nodded a couple of times, looked up at Damien and announced, ‘We’ll go with that take. I think I’m happy.’

And about bloody time, I said to myself.

Damien glanced at his watch and announced, ‘The gate is clear, ladies and gentlemen. We have a print-take, finally, so that’s a wrap on location photography for
Lost in Action
.’

There was scattered applause from the exhausted crew, along with a few whistles. We’d been at it for eight weeks now and everyone was totally knackered from early starts, late finishes and shooting six days a week.

The scene we’d just finished was actually the opening of the film, but for logistical reasons movies are often shot out of sequence. It was also the wrap shot, meaning cast and crew could now take a much-needed break and then reassemble in Queensland for another few weeks of filming.

‘Crew call for interior photography is at Warner Bros. Roadshow Studios on the Gold Coast in two weeks,’ Damien continued, ‘so enjoy the break. Wrap party tonight in the terrace bar of the Hotel Indochine Luxe Royale. Grips and gaffers will please wear pants. And if anyone missed our stills photographer, Mr Alby Murdoch, falling into that hole I’m sure he’ll be happy to do it one more time – with feeling.’

The crew laughed and whistled some more and then set about the business of packing up the production. The lights were quickly loaded back into trucks by burly blokes wearing shorts, workboots and tool belts; rented electrical generators were shut down for the very last time; army uniforms and equipment were collected by the wardrobe department and prop guns by the armourer. In less than an hour there’d be no sign we’d ever been at that location, apart from crushed vegetation and the odd paper cup, cigarette butt and lolly wrapper.

Shooting movie stills was generally a fun gig – taking photographs during production for use in PR and the advertising of the finished film six months or so down the track. The trick was to make sure I wasn’t seen by the movie camera and the click of my Nikon’s shutter wasn’t picked up by the sound recordist’s sensitive microphones. I’d sometimes shoot rehearsals, when the sound of my Nikon wouldn’t be intrusive, but on ‘takes’ or the actual filming of a scene I had to use a soundproofed camera housing or choose my moment carefully. If I got my timing wrong, and fired off a burst of shots at the wrong moment, a headphones-wearing sound recordist would look up from his Nagra digital recorder and glare at me.

I didn’t get it wrong too often, though – I’d learned not to. In my other job, the one nobody is supposed to know about, if you got it wrong the result could be a lot worse than just a nasty look from a sound recordist. It could get you hurt, and hurt bad. In fact, it could be downright fatal.

My other job, working for D.E.D., also involves getting the necessary shots without being sprung. The Directorate for Extra-territorial Defence is a top-secret Australian government intelligence-gathering department whose agents operate undercover as globe-trotting news photographers for the totally legit WorldPix International photo agency. Around 10 per cent of WorldPix snappers are spies, and the rest of the photographers and everyone else at WorldPix are unaware of the double life led by the undercover bods, or Dedheads, as we like to be called.

Setting up the WorldPix photo agency to provide cover for D.E.D. operatives had been my idea. The inspiration came from an early undercover assignment I’d done for D.E.D. in Afghanistan in the eighties, when I’d posed as a freelance wildlife photographer. Not only did I get my assigned shots of the Mujahadeen guerrillas using CIA-supplied Stinger anti-aircraft missiles against the Soviet invaders for the first time, I also snapped a series of pictures of mountain goats that was published internationally in the geographic magazines and made me a nice little pile of money.

It took some spirited arguing, but eventually those in charge in Canberra realised that not only could a picture agency be useful cover for D.E.D., it could also potentially pay its own way and perhaps even make a small profit. As it turned out, our talented photographers, spies and non-spies alike, began making very large profits right from the get-go.

Since WorldPix had become an unqualified and highly lucrative success, every bureaucrat in Canberra, including my new boss, the Honourable Gwenda Felton AO, and our ultimate boss, the Minister for Defence, was anxious to bask in its glory.

Gwenda Felton, Director-General of D.E.D., was a living, breathing demonstration of the law of physics which states that light travels faster than sound. At first sight she appeared to be a normal, if somewhat fashion-challenged, human being. When she opened her mouth, however, it was instantly clear that Gwenda’s grasp of reality was tenuous at best.

My recent shouting match with Gwenda, and subsequent suspension, had resulted from her suggestion that the government consider severing all ties between D.E.D. and WorldPix, and just run the WorldPix side of things as a purely money-making operation. She would take over as chief executive, while the D.E.D. operatives, myself included, would be chucked out to fend for themselves in a very cold world.

The idea was breathtaking in its short-sightedness and stupidity, and I’d made the mistake of telling her so. Gwenda may have been a political appointee with limited powers of reasoning but she had plenty of friends in high places, and I didn’t stand a chance. I was suspended from D.E.D. and she’d even pulled me from the WorldPix shooting roster. There was a brief moment when it seemed appropriate to punch her lights out, but I’d been brought up never to raise my hand to a lady, or even to someone like Gwenda.

A recent change of government had forced Gwenda to put her privatisation plan on the back burner, as she, like all political appointees of the former government, was busy ducking for cover and frantically figuring out ways to save her skin. But I was still on suspension since I had very few friends in high places and Gwenda Felton really knew how to hold a grudge.

When my mate Boxer heard about my suspension he made a few phone calls and landed me a job shooting stills for a feature film he was about to start working on in Vietnam. Byron Oxenbould was a much sought-after sound recordist and the film’s producers were happy to go along with his suggestion. After all, I had an international reputation as a photographer, I was available, and I’m always more than ready to hop on a plane to any place in the world that has great food.

Which was why I was in the middle of the chaos of a film crew wrapping one last location somewhere in the Mekong Delta. I was tired, hot and sweaty, and looking forward to a shower and a couple of weeks of doing absolutely nothing. I’d just finished packing my cameras and lenses into their cases when Jack Smart yelled, ‘Hey, Murdoch. Fancy a lift back to the big smoke?’

Ho Chi Minh City might be better called the Big Smog but the thought of getting there pronto, into some air-conditioning and scrubbing off the dirt under a hot hotel shower sounded just great. My lift back to the city would be in a sixties-vintage Huey helicopter, the same chopper that had zoomed low over the patrol earlier, right on cue, flown by Jack’s mate Van Tuan, or VT A man would be crazy to say no to an offer like that.

Jack Smart was the film’s military advisor, the bloke who made sure all the actors and extras playing soldiers saluted with the correct hand, pointed the business ends of their rifles at the enemy in firefights and kept hold of the pin and chucked the hand grenade, rather than the other way round.

Jack really was an ex-soldier and Vietnam veteran, as advertised, but there was a wee bit more to him than the rest of the crew knew. He was actually Jack Stark, an Aussie who’d been conscripted in the sixties, gone to Vietnam and risen through the ranks, got himself a battlefield commission and been promoted to major before being chucked out in disgrace for unspecified reasons.

The behind-the-scenes reason for this well-publicised dishonourable discharge was to provide cover for a government false flag operation, in which Stark was set up as a bitter and deranged anti-government activist known as the Mad Major, living inside an isolated, booby-trap-protected compound on a hilltop in Far North Queensland.

Stark, as planned, became a hero for many of the world’s emerging terrorist splinter groups, which made it easy for him to infiltrate them. When he eventually discovered that an extreme right-wing cabal with strong influence inside the Australian government had been using him for their own purposes, Stark jacked up, refusing to play along, and was marked for elimination. He was reported to have died in a massive explosion at his mountain hideout.

The truth was that he now lived in Macau, where along with his mate VT he ran a boutique hotel called the Pousada do Estoril. Jack and the Australian government had apparently agreed to a truce, allowing him to stay dead in peace. I figured this meant that Jack had a lot of embarrassing dirt on some very highly placed people.

The movie we were working on,
Lost in Action
, was a dramatisation of the life and death of another Vietnam soldier, Major Peter Cartwright VC. Cartwright had gone into Vietnam early on as part of the Australian army training team, serving through to 1969. He’d gone missing, presumed killed, in a battle up near the border with North Vietnam. Cartwright had been recommended for the Victoria Cross a few months before his death when he’d called in an air strike on his own position as his unit was about to be overrun by the enemy.

‘Ballsy move on his part, and not always as suicidal as it sounds,’ Jack had explained one night over post-wrap drinks. ‘If you’re well dug in, and you know what’s coming, you stand a hell of a lot better chance than an enemy advancing towards you without cover over open ground.’

Jack had worked with Cartwright for a brief period, and his knowledge of the late major together with his attention to detail had caused some friction on the set. Early on in the production, we’d shot a scene where Cartwright stood in a smoke-filled jungle clearing, valiantly blazing away with his Owen gun into masses of advancing North Vietnamese Army regulars to provide cover for the withdrawal of his patrol. Jack had a barney with the director about the actor playing Cartwright using a weapon like the Owen gun and standing up in the middle of a firelight.