Draw the Brisbane Line (30 page)

‘They have fucken helicopters!’ someone shouted in panic.

‘Don’t be thick,’ Tino shouted back for anyone to hear.  ‘Those are Blackhawks.  It’s Army.  The cavalry, people.’

Dave wasn’t thinking of the Army or the looters when he saw those great dark birds cut up the air above them and drop down to land a few blocks away.  He was thinking that Jenny was in a helicopter when he last spoke to her.  Hope and horror filled him and curdled.  He wanted to see her more than anything else he could imagine, to be with her again. But he didn’t want her anywhere near
there
.

The looters began queueing about five metres from the barricade, revving their engines as though rate of acceleration might somehow help them fly over the top.

Tino reached into his car and came out with a radio handset.  ‘Turn around,’ he said, and his magnified voice rose above the motorcycle buzzing, but only just.  ‘Turn around and get out of here.  You’re not coming into this town.’

One of the looters at the front of the crowd, a wiry looking guy wearing an unseasonably bulky overcoat, heavily decorated in what appeared to be gold and diamonds, turned off the engine on his vintage Piaggio with bulging panniers and held a hand up in the air.  One by one, the engines behind him fell silent, until very soon the only motors to be heard were from the nearby helicopters.

‘Step aside,’ he shouted.  ‘Nobody needs to get hurt.’

A lot of laughter from the looters at that.

He had one of those voices which made Dave want to plug his ears.  Nasal to the point where surgical intervention might become necessary, just to provide some airflow.

Tino returned the handset to the interior of the car and straightened up.  His chest swelled as he drew in a lungful of air.  ‘Turn around,’ he bellowed.  ‘Turn around, get the fuck out of my town, or you
will
get hurt!’

Righteous anger roiled through the crowd like a powerful groundswell.  Every hair follicle on Dave’s body bristled and prickled at his clothing.

‘You don’t get it,’ the little guy in the big clothes shouted back.  ‘Do you?  This isn’t your town.  Right now, this is
our
town.  This is
our
time.’

‘Like fucking hell!’ someone shouted from a few rows of defenders behind Dave, and he felt that push again, that surge of resolve, of indignation, of the potent, stubborn refusal to give in to these poseur twats.  Who did they think they were, that they can just roll up on their dinky scooters and have their way with the town?  With
his
town?

The gun in the back of his jeans seemed to grow hotter and colder at the same time, as if it wanted to be taken out.  He started to reach around, but then he thought of Pia perched up on one of the balconies of a nearby hotel, scanning for any threats to Dave, ready to take them out.  He really shouldn’t try to attract any more attention than he already was.

‘You’re not going to get past us,’ Tino boomed.  ‘I’ll say it again for anyone who didn’t hear me the first time.  You.  Are.  Not.  Going.  To.  Get.  Past.  Us.’

And then the murmuring, the taunts, the shouting, it all stopped.  Both sides fell silent.  This was the point where the script ran out, and someone would have to pick up the pen and write the next line.  This was the tipping point, where the situation could either be defused or explode.

This was the point where one of the front-line looters shouted
Queenslander
before revving his scooter and lurching forward for a gap on the side of the barricade. He didn’t see the road spikes that Tino and his fellow officers had laid across the road in front of the barricade.  The sudden loss of air in his tyres didn’t stop him, but he struggled to control the scooter’s direction.  He crashed straight into the side of the big Caterpillar earth mover.  Dave couldn’t see it happen, but the groan of the looters — punctuated here and there by laughter — told him the driver had probably come to a painful end.  He looked across at Tino, who appeared to be fighting his policeman’s reflex to attend to the scene of an accident.  This, Dave and Tino both understood, was less about performing one’s civic duty as it was about observing rules of engagement.

The wiry guy with the big coat nodded to a pair of looters on his left, dark-skinned with heavy tattoo work and physiques carved by iron and maybe steroids.  They each wore black wool ski masks over their heads.  They revved their dirt bikes and peeled off to either side of the barricade, moving with considerably greater caution than the hapless first wave.  Dave could see they were easily avoiding the tyre-damage spikes.  While the police car’s spots were angled to conceal them, the glare from the news crews employed no such subtlety.  It was almost as if they wanted to hurry along the confrontation, maybe to preserve their camera batteries.

As soon as they started moving, Tino nodded to two of the other cops, to his left and to his right. They stepped to the edges of the barricade, one snapping an extensible baton out to its full length, the other slipping a Taser from a holster on his belt.

Dave sensed a disruption in the taut balance of the crowd, of
his
crowd.  Rough shouts were barked from somewhere near the middle of the mass of defenders.  He turned his head, keeping one eye on the impending clash at the barricade, the other scanning for the source of the incursion.  Someone was trying to force their way through the crowd, he couldn’t see how many of them there were.  His right eye showed him one of the cops — Todhunter, if Dave remembered correctly — step around the Cat dozer with the baton upraised over his shoulder, while the left eye tracked the fast-moving line being cut through the crowd, heading his way.

Shit, he thought, what if they were coming for him?  What if it was the QTA on a snatch mission?  Isn’t that what Pia said they might try?  Surely they wouldn’t risk it with all the media in attendance.

He turned in place, panic crawling into his chest and filling it, leaving just enough room for his heart to expand and contract, but only just.  Where was Pia?  In a motel somewhere, providing overwatch.  But where?  He couldn’t see her.

Right eye: Todhunter swung hard in a downward arc as the looter on the bike emerged from the side of the dozer.  The baton connected with the guy’s shoulder, and he went down. The bike skidded onto its side, wheels spinning and lightly grazing the road surface, sending small fragments of gravel skittering over feet and shoes.

Left eye: The crowd parted for the new arrivals, who arrived in the front lines led by a tall man in army fatigues.  Eight, ten, twelve … they kept coming. 
Army
, Dave thought, and his heart lifted.  Then he caught a glimpse of a blonde ponytail in the middle of the soldiers, and both hopefully and fearfully he thought,
Jenny
.

He shifted his focus to the approaching group of soldiers, away from Todhunter and the now-subdued looter.  He scanned the group for the owner of the ponytail, and soon picked her out.  Hope and fear immediately deflated, and rather than cancel each other out they left a void: it wasn’t Jenny.  He recognised her though.  How could he mistake Banksia Mackie for anyone else?  A young blonde guy walked beside her, two civilians surrounded by these military types.  He caught her eye with a short wave.  She clocked him and smiled, returning his wave.  He’d met her once or twice before.

The soldier on point passed Dave close enough for them to shake hands, but the guy’s hostile posture and tight glare said that was never going to happen.  He walked straight towards the police car, to Tino.

‘You see?’ the scrawny guy, the scarecrow, bellowed from the other side of the barricade.  ‘You see what they did?  They don’t want to talk, they don’t want to observe our
rights
.  They want to keep us
down
.  The kings are in their castle and they want us to stay outside the gates, and as long as we continue providing them with power, maintaining their lawns, unclogging the fatty shit from their toilets and delivering their food and their booze, then they’re happy to let us be.  But do you think they’ll ever let us be anything more than that?’

The guy was effective on the soapbox.  Dave was sure Tom would have recognised his political potential and tried to draft him into the party, back when he was in a party.  But when Dave looked at his staring, bloodshot eyes, at his face constantly twitching between smile and sneer so quickly it was difficult to tell which it was … all he saw was danger.  He preached to his congregation, and they responded with an unsettling low growl.  He thought of the two looters sent to breach the barricade, and Dave realised that this is what Scarecrow had planned, what he was counting on.  He knew they’d be taken out by the police, and he could use it as fuel to fire the masses.

‘They’re not afraid of resorting to violent means,’ Scarecrow shouted to his followers.  ‘Are we afraid?’

The growl grew and swelled and words bubbled up out of it,
no
and
fucking pricks
and
Queenslander!
  Dave looked across at the media contingent — they were eating this up, every last pixel and mutter.

A warm hand settled on the side of Dave’s shoulder, and the friendly face of Banksia Mackie suddenly disrupted the background scene of violent potential.

‘Jenny’s fine,’ she said to him.  ‘She’s safe.’

Dave’s legs nearly went from beneath him as the message sunk in.  Jenny was fine.  She was safe.  He hadn’t dared entertain the idea that she would be anything but fine and safe, but now he felt the risk and the threat of a thousand attacks and accidents and medical complications swell and expand from deep inside his core.

His knees wobbled, but they kept him up.  Jenny was safe. 

But where was she?

Two soldiers remained near the back of the pack, and when the crowd began to thicken around them, they silently began to tack to the right, to the ocean side of the street.  Unlike the other soldiers, these two carried rifles.  Theirs was not the way of public relations, of pushing their cause on the television and in the papers and on Twitter and on Facebook.

They were Jim Templeton’s men.

They moved steadily along the fringe of the crowd, where Templeton told them they would find their contact, the guy who’d take them to the best vantage point and help them pick out any hostiles.  Spotting him wasn’t difficult; he was the only one not giving them a wide berth or looking to head in a different direction.  He saw them and he nodded, his deeply-tanned and sun-stretched face reflecting the light from the street lights.  He bunched up his matted dreadlocks into a thick ponytail and slipped a bright yellow band over it to hold the mess together.  That was the signal.  He rewarded them with a gappy grin as they stepped up to him, and perhaps conscious of the gulf between his own bearing and theirs, he tried to straighten his back, draw his shoulders back and correct his posture.  If the two soldiers didn’t know he was on their side, they might have thought he was trying to mock them.  He took a long drag on his vape pen and tugged habitually on his chin beard.

‘GI Jane’s in town,’ the hipster said in a voice weighed down with loose gravel and sand.  ‘Showed up with Dave Holden not long ago.  Been chattin’ with the bill.’

The two soldiers shared a look. The American bitch wasn’t within their operating parameters, they were supposed to provide support to Jim and his soldiers when they arrived.  But to take a scalp like hers, a Yank who murdered one of their comrades, gunned him down in cold blood … how could they pass that up?

‘You see where she went?’ the more senior of the two soldiers said.

The gap-toothed hipster smiled.  ‘I took
special
note of where she went.’

‘And where was that?’

Jenny gave up trying to figure out what the fuck was happening about fifteen minutes into the journey.  If she was in the "safe" chopper, then what were Sammo and his thuggish mate doing on it?  And why were the QTA soldiers all running through weapons and equipment checks, looking for all money as though they were about to storm Omaha fucking Beach.

She tried to catch Jim’s attention by waving like a drunk idiot, but he resolutely ignored her, remaining up front with his eyes fixed forward.

The smell of the gun oil made her feel like she wanted to start spitting.  When she swallowed, she felt like she was drinking copper and castor oil.  She tried closing her eyes, but when she did, all the dips and tilts and drops and lifts of the helicopter felt amplified, exaggerated, and her head and stomach suddenly wrapped around her own internal gyroscope and spun and twisted and rolled and oh God she was going to lose it all over the cabin of the Blackhawk.

And she did.  There was no time to ask for a bag, or better yet to request the pilot to set down so she could go and find a private space, perhaps a bush or a tree, where she could discretely vomit up her breakfast.  Jennifer Lucas, emerging Hollywood starlet and half of the country’s celebrity power-couple-of-the-moment, lowered her head between her knees and convulsed as her throat and sinus burned with bile and acid.  The mess on the floor between her feet was barely visible in the dim glow of the cabin, but the smell was unavoidable.  To their credit, the QTA soldiers seemed to be ignoring her outburst, or upburst, and they simply carried on cradling their weapons and contemplating whatever might await them when they touched down.

Sammo wasn’t able to ignore her quite so gallantly.  She glanced up and saw him barely containing a smirk.  She looked down at location of the mess, then back up at Sammo, and felt a smile open up on her own face.  She gestured to Sammo with an open upraised palm, directing it at the vomit.  With her eyebrows raised she was saying,
you want some?
  His smirk thinned and flattened out, and he tried to give her a cold stare, like he was willing her to feel the invisible knives he was hurling at her.  Laughter bubbled up out of her chest.

‘I thought maybe you’d developed a taste for it,’ she shouted at him, howling her mirth despite the raw sting which accompanied every chuckle passing along her oesophagus, despite knowing he almost certainly couldn’t hear her.

They banked and dipped for what felt like an eternity.  Jenny had a watch on her wrist but she wasn’t keen to look at it.  Reading even the time with all that dipping and drifting, like trying to read a book or a map while driving, would trip her vomit switch.  So when they finally landed, Jenny had no idea what time it was, or how long the journey had taken them.  Somewhere between half an hour and an hour. Longer than a sitcom, but shorter than a film.  The cabin shuddered briefly and Jenny felt that unmistakable non-sensation of being grounded, no movement or suspension.  Her stomach knew it before her brain did, immediately withdrawing all threats of revolt.

While her stomach might have settled, her heart had not.

Jim stepped out from the cabin as the rotors began to slow.  The noise didn’t so much drop as just change in pitch, the high-rev whine replaced by a deep thrumming winding-down.

‘You all know your roles,’ he said to the men.  He turned to the soldier seated beside Jenny.  ‘Sorry Deano, you’ve got baby-sitting duty.  Miss Lucas, you do whatever Deano here says.  Your life most likely depends on it.’

Deano seemed nonplussed by his short-straw allocation; or at least he didn’t let it show that he was bothered.

But what was that about her
life
depending on it?

‘What is this?’ she said.  ‘Where are we?’  She was searching inside herself for bravado, for defiance, but seemed to have lost them both somewhere along the way.  Maybe they went out with her breakfast.  ‘Are we in Byron?’

‘Close enough,’ grumbled the big man next to Sammo.  ‘Don’t worry yourself love, this won’t take long.’  He unbuckled his lap belt and pushed himself out of the seat, wincing in obvious pain.  Big as he was, to Jenny he didn’t look like he should be up and walking around. He looked like he could benefit from an extended hospital stay.

She grabbed a handful of Jim’s shirt as he tried to walk away, and her wrist brushed the hard butt of the handgun holstered at his waist.  His hand, the one closest to the gun, twitched at the contact, and she could see him forcing it to be still when he saw who it was interrupting his exit.

‘Hey!’ she said.  ‘What the fuck is going on?  The whole point of me being here, I thought, was so I could witness the
altruism
of you and your boy scouts.’

‘That’s
Al’s
plan,’ Jim said, having to raise his whine above that of the still spinning rotors.  ‘This one’s mine.’

Jenny unbuckled herself from her seat and walked over to the open doorway on legs which felt like they were still somewhere in Queensland.  The soldiers filed past her out into the dark morning, and she gazed past their bobbing silhouettes at the open stretch of grass and the illuminated house at the end of it.  Over a dozen men stood out the front, and there looked to be motorcycles lined up to the side, big hogs.

This was not Byron Bay.  Those were not QTA soldiers.  What in the hell had she landed in?