Draw the Brisbane Line (31 page)

Pia focused in on the hungry-looking guy in the big coat.  He was really getting the looters fired up, focusing their collective energies on a common purpose, a common enemy; which was a remarkable achievement when you understood that the moral compass of almost every criminal in attendance was permanently oriented to magnetic me.

She flipped the safety off with her thumb and considered taking a shot.  If she removed the head, would she kill the beast?  Or would she merely be removing the only restraint they had?  Probably the latter.  She straightened out her shooting finger and scanned the crowd.  She saw Holden, looking typically dumbfounded that any of this shit was happening in his country.  But there was a slight shift in his posture, in his expression.  He was starting to get it.  It might have taken hundreds of rabid looters banging at his door, but at least he was finally beginning to understand that not only
could
this shit happen in his country, it
was
happening.

A woman was next to Dave, a hand on his arm, talking to him, smiling.  It certainly wasn’t Jenny Lucas — Pia had
her
face burned into her memory — but she was still familiar in that Hollywood tabloid way.  Pia cycled through images in her memory: actress on the red carpet; actress in rehab; singer in rehab; woman shoulder-deep in the back end of an adult elephant … that was it.  Banksia Mackie.

This was unusual.  Two A-list Aussie celebrities in the same place in Australia, if it wasn’t organised, was unusual.  But for them to converge in a situation like this was just weird.  And coupled with the likelihood that Jenny Lucas was somewhere nearby, it was shaping up to be the equivalent of a snowstorm in the middle of summer.

It had to be the QTA.  They knew the media would be on hand, so they were determined to put their best jackboot forward.  What better way to do that than bring in some celebrity spokespeople?  It’s exactly the play Tom had predicted.  Wouldn’t he be an insufferable prick when he found out he was right?  Again.

She scanned the ranks of the QTA until she located Aldous Weir.  Tom had him pegged as an idealist, but not an extremist.  The extremist was the one she had to be watch for.  But as hard as she looked, as thoroughly as she scanned the crowd, she could not locate Jim Templeton. 

She swung the scope back over to the looters and searched the shits for potential threats.  Most of them appeared to have very little in the way of weapons.  A lot of them wore many-pocketed jackets and cargo pants, but from what she could see, they were mostly bulging with shiny things and cash, as were the panniers some of them had strapped over their scooters.

She spotted one guy with a shotgun strapped to the side of a white Piaggio.  It appeared to be secured by silver duct tape.  To Pia, he looked like he’d be at home in just about any low-rent trailer park in the US.  Brown mullet, some kind of red or maroon football jersey, short navy shorts and flip-flops … Pia marvelled at the stupidity of anyone who’d drive a scooter at speed over a long distance, at night, in shorts and flip-flops.  He was working away at one edge of the tape, trying to free the gun.  She wondered whether she should put a bullet in him on principle, but she just wasn’t sure which principle was the most badly offended.

She wanted to hear the phone ring, or at least feel it vibrate, but she also wanted it to stay quiet.  Tom was supposed to be the only one with the number, but she knew command would get it sooner or later, and that was the conversation she dreaded. 

Keeping her eye on the crowd and her right finger gently touching the trigger, she reached into the bag with her left hand and felt around for the handset.  The first thing her hand touched was the handgun, and she was about to move past it when she head the soft scrape of a boot from the other side of the bedroom door.  She slowly turned her head away from the scope and looked back into the darkened bedroom. 

She didn’t even have time to adjust her position when the door exploded inwards.  Two men stood in the open doorway, one down on his knee having just kicked the door in, the other aiming an old AK-47 right at her.  They both wore military fatigues, which presumably meant they were QTA.

‘Finger off the trigger,’ the man with the gun said.  ‘Slowly.’

Pia did as he said, slowly.  She released her grip on the sniper rifle and moved her hand, palm open and facing him, as far away from the gun as she could.  Moving her hand away from the rifle was academic, really, unless he was a spectacularly poor shot, or just short on nerves, because she’d never be able to swing it around one-eighty degrees fast enough.

Hoping that he was tracking her right hand, she quickly whipped the handgun out with her left and loosed off three quick shots, rolling to her left as she went.  As soon as she was clear of the doorway she quickly stepped out and threw herself through it.  They hopefully wouldn’t have been expecting her to jump
into
the room with them.  Out on the balcony — even if she jumped from it — she was a sitting duck.  Behind her, the crowd on the street exploded into a riot of shouts and battle cries and revving engines.

She scanned the room and caught a glimpse of one of them to her right, just as something hard and fast hit her from her left like a hammer hitting the bell of her head, and she hit the floor with every part of her body ringing loudly.

She blinked her eyes open only to have to close them again, the glare from a torch aimed directly into her face like a tiny abusive sun.  She tried to force them to adjust, picking a dark spot and focusing on just that.

She realised that the dark point she’d settled on was the surprised
oh
of a rifle’s bore.  She blinked her eyes and a second gaping barrel resolved into focus against the backdrop of a couple of pairs of camouflage trousers.  She could only make out the hems in any detail, one pair in traditional jungle green and the other a semi-urban mix of greens and browns.  These guys must have had to supply their own uniforms.

‘We should radio this into alpha team,’ the one wearing the urban pattern said.  ‘This wasn’t covered in our orders.’

‘You want to wait for orders?’ Jungle Greens grumbled.  ‘We’re at war here.  This is the enemy.’

‘Then let’s take her prisoner.’

‘Take her where?  Until alpha team arrives, it’s just you and me.  Do you want to give away the game by strolling up to Weir and saying, hey, look who we found?  Whaddya think he’ll do, apart from smile and shake her hand for the cameras?’

‘Sounds like Weir has his hands full right now.’

‘Yeah, and so will we, if we try and get through that shit with a prisoner in tow.  Why’d you fucken sign up to the QTA if you don’t want to defend the state?’

‘Of
course
I want to fucken defend the fucken state.’

‘Well, part of that is repelling our enemies from our borders. 
This
bitch is an enemy, no fucken doubt about that.’

‘Um, fellas?’ Pia said, the back of her head pulsing with the words as though a tiny balloon was being repeatedly inflated and deflated, inflated and deflated, deep inside her skull.  ‘Couple of things.  First, I’m
not
your enemy; and second, this isn’t your state, so what is it you’re repelling me from?  Fucken.’

‘It’s close enough,’ Jungle Greens said.

Out on the balcony, something buzzed in Pia’s bag.  If she’d been standing up, she probably wouldn’t have heard it over the riot in the street; but with her head on the floor she
felt
it.

‘What were you doing out there?’ Urban said.  ‘Who were you targeting?’

‘I was providing overwatch, you assholes.’

‘For who?’ Jungle Greens said.  ‘Your buddy Dave?’

‘For the good guys,’ Pia said.  ‘For
your
guys too.’

Jungle greens snorted.  ‘Our guys aren’t here yet.  You know what I think?  I think you were going to fucken assassinate Aldous Weir.  We found you in your fucken sniper’s nest, but we weren’t able to stop you doing the deed.  But we fucken
were
able to take you out.’

‘I’m not going to hurt Weir,’ Pia said.  ‘Fucken.’

‘Your rifle over there looks very fucken convenient for the task.’

Another burst of buzzes vibrated in her bag on the balcony.

Despite the glare of the torch, she saw the red beam of the laser sights cut above the yellow-white light, and Jungle Greens and Urban were suddenly down on the ground with her, though she was the only one of them still breathing.  There was too much crowd noise for her to have heard the muffled shots, but she felt hot blood spatter across her cheek.  The torch, no longer shining in her eyes, had fallen to cast a ghoulish glow on the blank staring face of Jungle Greens, blood pooling around his head from the large wound in the side of it.  A thick brown beard concealed any possible expression of surprise. 

She pushed herself into a sitting position, ignoring the thick pain in her head, and saw Urban in a similar position to Jungle Green.  He looked young, early twenties but definitely not over twenty-five.  His shirt was dark with blood, and the top half of his head was scattered across the far side of the wall.  She turned her head on a neck which felt like it had been pumped tight with air.

‘You didn’t pick up your phone,’ the huge Navy SEAL said as he stepped into the light.

The SEAL wore full length black motorcycle leathers; the nearest thing to a uniform he had on was the set of night-vision goggles strapped to his head.

‘What you doin’ down there on the floor anyway?’ he said.

‘Oh, just a bit of yoga to kill time waiting for you.  How long you been following me?’

‘Since Sydney.  Thought you might have made me on the bridge.’

‘Right.  The motorcyclist who tried to run me off the road.’

‘Was just trying to fit in.  Ride like a local.’

His name was Bryk.  He explained his mission: to make sure she didn’t get killed, and to use her if the opportunity presented itself.

And the opportunity had apparently presented itself, and all of a sudden, Corporal Pia Papetti was back in official service.

Bryk slipped the night-vision goggles up over his head and nodded to the open balcony door.  ‘You got them all excited,’ he said.

‘They were already excited.’

Pia forced herself to stand up.  She lifted the torch off the floor and passed the light over Jungle Green’s body.  She saw what she was looking for, her handgun stuffed in the front of his pants, and bent down to slip it out.  The ballooning pain in her head threatened to pop, but she clenched her jaw and swallowed it back.

‘So where’s the cache?’ she said.  ‘Far from here?’

‘Back up in the hills a ways.  Near a little town called Bangalow.’

Pia tilted her face up towards the ceiling and felt a dry, rough chuckle bubble up out of her throat.  ‘Bangalow,’ she laughed.

‘This must be one a them private jokes, cos I ain’t gettin it.’

‘Yeah.  Private joke.  OK, so where you parked?’

‘Garage in an empty house, about two clicks away.’

‘Two clicks past all that shit out there?’

‘Fraid so.’

Pia exhaled.  ‘OK.  I’ll just pack up my shit, then we’ll get out of here.’

She hated to leave Dave unprotected, but she couldn’t disobey direct orders.  And she’d already objected to his involvement, she’d been clear about that.  He’d made his bed, he could lie in it.

Every crowded instinct in Al’s body screamed at him to get down off the car, but he resisted and straightened his back.  The cameras were on him, and this was going to leave a lasting impression with many people about what the QTA was all about, what it stood for.

He couldn’t step down.

‘This is not a war,’ he shouted at the mass of looters.  ‘It’s not some righteous battle.  It’s crime, plain and simple.  You will be caught, and you will be prosecuted.  You’ve probably been filmed on CCTV already.  What you do here, now, it might be the difference between community service and imprisonment.’

‘You hear that?’ the scarecrow kid said, laughing as though he were genuinely amused.  ‘Community service?  Indentured servitude, that’d be a great result for these guys, wouldn’t it?’

‘You think I’m some kind of wealthy land baron?  I’m a
farmer
.  The people behind me, they work in shops, they run bars and restaurants.’ 
Try to ignore the two celebrities in the front row.

‘Well, I don’t know much about farming, but I do know about property prices.  I know you don’t live in a place like this unless you have a lot of coin.  And the only way people in this country make that kind of money is by
exploiting
those less fortunate, less privileged.  That’s the end of the scale
we’re
on, the less end.’

He was really playing up the Robin Hood angle, and the predictable rabble was buying into it.  They murmured, some shouted agreement, and engines revved when voices were deemed inadequate.  Arguing was a lost cause in terms of persuading them, but he hoped that the longer he held them off, the more he could engage them by talking, some of the antagonism might dissipate.  If their adrenaline began to taper off, as eventually it must, many of them would surely lose some of that destructive motivation.

It might have worked too, but he’d never know.  Three gunshots shouted over everyone, and hopes of a bloodless resolution went out the window.  The scarecrow shouted an inarticulate battle-cry, and hundreds of bike motors revved like a swarm of angry monster wasps, and they advanced.

Al turned his head to the defenders behind him and shouted, ‘Hold the line!’

Dave watched restraint crumble to chaos so quickly it felt like a bomb going off, and the looters rode the crest of the shock wave.  They drove their bikes and scooters forward with shouts of rage, and the occasional cry of
Queenslander
, heedless of the road spikes they’d seen in use only moments earlier.  The front line went down in a series of muffled pops as the air rushed from their tyres and they skidded to the blacktop.  Dave didn’t know whether the looters immediately behind them simply hadn’t registered what had happened to them, or whether they thought the spikes were single-use devices, like land-mines, but they too drove over the spikes, went down, and added their rides to the crippled machines in front of them.  Maybe this was how it had been for soldiers in the early wars, climbing out of the trenches and having to negotiate the bodies of their recently-deceased comrades, machine-gun fire and mortars raining down on them as they went.  The defenders of Byron, however, had neither machine guns nor rockets. No-one had even thought to bring along a few rocks.  Dave looked along the line, and saw everyone staring at the advancing mess in tense fascination.  Banksia slipped her pump-action shotgun into a holster on her back, never taking her eyes off her opposition, and slid something out of a pocket in her trousers.  It was black and thin, and when she flicked her wrist, it snapped out into about half a metre of heavy steel. 

He wasn’t sure, glancing at her face only briefly, but he could have sworn she was grinning.

He looked over his shoulder at his fellow defenders.  He recognised the waiter from the pizzeria by his dark hair and his piercings, but his face was harder, leaner, and his light touch with hot plates and full glasses was not in evidence as he wrung the handle of his baseball bat as though he were expecting it to yield juice.  The English girl he’d been chatting to, gone too was her friendly nervousness, replaced by a touch of the ultra-violent posture, ready to kill.  Part of him wanted to get away from there, fast.  A massive mob of rioting looters charged toward him from one side, and a wall of blood-ready defenders blocked his retreat.  Another part of him wanted to stand firm with the defenders, and that part of him wanted the gun in his hand, not tucked into his jeans.  He resisted the urge and looked back over the barricade.

The bikes and scooters were beginning to pile up in a long line.  Some of the looters thought to try an off-road route, but Tino and his fellow officers apparently anticipated that, because their bikes suffered the same blow-out fate as the others.

‘Off your bikes!’ Scarecrow was shouting all around him.  ‘Off your bikes!’  He was having trouble being heard over the buzzing swarm, but the media contingent gave him a helping hand by shining their lights on him, illuminating him in the early morning gloom.  Bright rainbow sparkles flashed off his neck, his hands, and Dave recognised the rich glitter of diamonds when he saw it.  The guy was covered in them. It drew the eye, and Dave found himself
trying
to hear what was coming out of his mouth.

His colleagues in chaos paid attention to him, ditching their bikes and leaping over the barricade.

There, sideways movement on the periphery of Scarecrow’s stage.  Dave’s eyes were caught by this incongruously purposeful motion slicing across the rabble, and he shifted his focus to the figure.  No, not one figure, two.  And one of them was Pia, her black bag of death slung over one shoulder and a rifle in her hand.  He waved his hand madly, trying to catch her eye, but he felt like the flea on the back of a great shaggy dog, lost and practically invisible.

You could fire the gun in the air
, the trigger-happy part of him whispered. 
She’d see you then
.  Yeah, and so would all those other yahoos.  Like that guy for instance, climbing to the top of a couple of bikes and lifting a shotgun into the air clenched in an upraised fist.  Even in the gloom, his eyes flashed a bright shade of crazy.

‘Queenslander!’ he shouted, his gravelly cry carrying above the din.

Oh hell
, Dave thought.

Al looked around for his men.  Most of them were right behind him, but he couldn’t place a couple of them.  Davidson and Schick.  Now why was he not surprised by that?  He’d have preferred to have those two on Jim’s chopper, hopefully where they couldn’t do much damage.  He was nervous about where they might have gone and positioned themselves.

He thought about asking one of his men to fetch him a rifle.  Words were a lost cause in this mess, perhaps the image of a military rifle might temper their enthusiasm.  But was that what he wanted the media, the people of Australia, to see?  Was that the image the QTA wanted to project?  Maybe not by default, but he couldn’t forget that they
were
an army.  What was the point of them if they couldn’t defend the land.

He was about to motion to Damo to get him a gun when he heard the strangled cry of
Queenslander!
  He turned his head to see the bogan in the Origin jersey standing on a pile of downed motors, a shotgun raised in the air over his head.

Oh hell
, he thought.

Pia pushed her way through the crush of rioters as though she belonged there.  Her attitude must have helped, because no-one made any attempt to stop her or slow her down.  Mind, that could have easily been due to the Stealth Recon Scout .308 rifle she carried in one hand, or the two-hundred-pound Navy SEAL clearing the path for her, similarly armed and with the conspicuous night-vision gear still strapped to his head.

Nah.  It was probably just her hard attitude.

She glanced over to the front line of defence as she moved, looked beyond the grandstanding Aldous Weir to see Dave Holden crouched behind him. 
Keep your head down, Dave
, she thought. 
But keep in on your shoulders
.  It was now a secondary objective, but she still had to get Dave Holden and Jennifer Lucas away to safety.  She’d expected that to be a relatively easy win, thinking, how dangerous could it be?  This was Australia, not fucking Afghanistan.

She could see Dave waving at her from the corner of her eye, but she couldn’t acknowledge him.  Those TV crews across the street were pretty close, and while the glare of their cameras wasn’t shining near her right then, it wouldn’t take much to attract their attention.

Bryk looked at her and chopped his hand at the houses on their side of the street. 
Cut through
.  She nodded, and was about to head off after him when something else moved in her periphery, one of the looters taking an elevated position in the middle of the whole mess.

‘Queenslander!’ he shouted in a voice long strained from shouting.

She tilted her head slightly further, saw the shotgun he held in the air.  Then she saw him raising it to a firing position.

Her brain immediately switched over to threat-assessment mode.  The weapon he had was a twin-barrelled shotgun, over-under, probably twelve-gauge, but sawn-off short.  Browning or similar.  His range was about forty-feet to the front line, and although he appeared to be taking aim at Aldous Weir, and while it was not in her brief to explicitly defend Weir or any other QTA member, there was a distinct risk that the spread of the blast, combined with the likely inaccuracy of the shooter, could result in Dave being injured.

And protecting Dave Holden most certainly
was
in her remit.

In one quick motion, not even bothering to drop her heavy carry-all, she lifted the rifle to her shoulder and sighted in on the Queenslander, made a quick adjustment for distance, and took the top of his head off.

She would have preferred a more subtle chest shot, but shooting up at the moron’s head posed a much lower risk of collateral injuries.

She was on the move with Bryk, ducking down the side of a weather-board bungalow, before the cameras had a chance to find her.  She didn’t know how many of the looters had seen her take the shot, but she hoped they had sense enough to leave her alone.

They did.