all right!” he smiled. “I’ll see the Governor General this morning and set up the election a month from next Saturday.”
He stood and walked to the wall calendar. After a few seconds’ consideration he pointed to a date. “God loves me,” he intoned. “A week after footie Grand Final. No time for the punters to think too much about the issues.” He rubbed his hands together “Yes! That gives you two weeks to get those planes over and the service chiefs up to speed. Then…”
“But, PM,” Woolley interrupted. “There could be twenty-five thousand people arriving within two weeks! Didn’t you hear me?”
“Oh, I heard you all right,’ he answered. “There’ll be thousands of aliens running around suburbia scaring the shit out of Mr and Mrs Oz.”
“Is that wise? We may never find them.”
“Wise? It’s brilliant!” He laughed. “The press’ll be howling for blood. We tell ’em the opposition and the Greens are wimps, stopping us in the Senate. We shaft them both at the same time. We just let ’em think there are hundreds of thousands of rapists and terrorists on the way and bingo! We win.”
“These people aren’t rapists or bloody terrorists,” objected Woolley. “They’re just poor starving families displaced by climate change. They aren’t…”
“Who says they aren’t?” he demanded. “Who cares if they aren’t? Don’t you be the one who says they aren’t! We say nothing and our wonderful Australian people, our give-’em-a-fair-go-Australian-values people will feel threatened and that’s what we want. We’ve at least, watch my lips, twenty-five thousand arriving in two weeks and who knows how many hundreds of thousands on the water and how many millions packing their shit ready to head off. They’re the ones watching what happens and they’re the ones we’re sending the telegrams to.”
“But you can’t kill twenty-five thousand people!” shouted Woolley.
“I don’t think it’ll come to that, but if it does, we do it, or we have to shoot a quarter of a million a month later. Again I ask, Brett; what would you do? Let them all come ashore and totally stuff up one of the few economies still intact?” He pointed his finger at Woolley’s ample chest. “Because that’s what they’ll do!”
“I don’t know. They’ve got to go somewhere, poor bastards.”
“I agree, but not here. OK?” He stood to conclude the meeting. “Just prepare the orders. Get the chiefs in, brief them and have them prepare operation outlines for action in, say, three weeks, but have the outlines on my desk in a week. And for Christ’s sake, this is top secret. Don’t delegate. No e-mails and lock everything up. Got that?”
“I guess so,” agreed Woolley reluctantly, heaving his huge bulk out of the chair. “I’ll sign the delivery order today and get to work on the service chaps but I still don’t think this’ll solve your problem.”
“You miss the point. My problem is re-election. Your problem is border protection. Your problem will solve my problem. We’ll get back in with a mandate to do anything we want. I don’t like it any more than you do, but this is survival of the fittest. We’re the fittest and we aim to stay that way. Understand?”
“Yes, PM, I understand,” he agreed reluctantly.
“How many planes are on order?”
“Two hundred.”
“We might need more. See if you can do a deal on another hundred. We don’t want any of those little buggers up north thinking we’re short of fire power.”
“We don’t have a budget allocation for another hundred. We usually run that past Treasury.”
“Don’t you worry about Treasury. Your first priority is the planes and ordnance, then the generals.”
He handed over the document. Woolley stared at it in his hand for a long moment, nodding his head. He had no choice. There was no choice.
“Right, PM,” he said as he turned to go. “I’ll have the whole operation ready for your perusal in a week.”
“Good man.” Mulaney smiled and turned back to his desk to sit, his minister dismissed.
As the door closed, he lifted the intercom phone. “Set up a meeting with the Governor General,” he commanded. “ASAP.”
He listened for confirmation, then hung up, sighed and began sketching out his press release.
The election was in the bag and he was about to serve notice on the world that he was the statesman and leader the free world had been waiting for.
13. MEKONG
Diesels do that; they just keep chugging along, the old ones leaving trails of smoke. Worn rings produce blue smoke; worn injector system and it’s black. This boat had both, but she still clanked and clonked and wheezed along as she had done for years.
Lin Poi had taken days to become accustomed to using the bucket. The lack of real privacy depressed her spirits, but the children were thriving, playing games on deck with other children and being fed well, despite the cramped cooking facility. The old trawler had only a two-burner methylated spirit stove but the women worked well together. The men were given watches, two at a time to navigate and keep a lookout for other vessels.
Loi was fascinated by the GPS plotter as the little icon crept across the coloured map, winding between the islands, gradually moving south at seven knots.
Radar was rare on such fishing trawlers, but this one worked and was set on maximum range.
“Look at these.” Loi pointed to dots on the screen as the captain arrived in the wheelhouse. “I’ve been watching them for a couple of hours and they all seem to be going our way.”
“Mmmm,” he answered. “I knew Thang bought a few boats, but there must be hundreds here.” He looked at the screen for a while. “Maybe there was more than one ‘Thang’!” he mused as he went to his chart table and withdrew a map of the Indonesian archipelago, then pored over the detail before returning to Loi.
“How many boats do you reckon?”
Loi looked again but had already made his estimate. “Two hundred, two hundred and fifty.”
“And they’re the ones in range!”
He stared for a few moments at the screen. “I don’t like the idea of all these people arriving in Australian waters together,” he grumbled. “It could get nasty!”
With that, he went forward, shaking the sleeping men and leading them aft until all were assembled. He then called Loi from his station to join them.
“You too, Loi,” he called softly. “We have at least half an hour of clear sea, so come here. We need to decide a few things.”
With a following breeze, smoke hung around the aft deck, stinging eyes and insulting noses. The men gathered around the captain, hunkering down as they all sought to avoid the fumes.
“We’re about halfway to Java,” he pointed off the port bow. “Those lights are on Anambas Island.”
