Rogue Element

Gioco went back to his slips. He had another two hundred or so to review and analyse before his day was done. He wouldn’t get home for at least another hour. No doubt there would be other interesting and relevant slips amongst the dross. He tapped the keystroke that fixed the slip from A-6 onto a desktop noticeboard, and attached a small flashing star to it. Bob found this system a good way to work. A lot of meaningless crap drifted into his etray. He took out the interesting or relevant slips from his pile and pinned them on the board for later review. The slip from Station 39 joined a couple of other unconnected slips forwarded by that old battleaxe in Hawaii. What was her name…?

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.’