Matt Eaton - Blank

It was a complication she didn’t need. If she called it in and requested a pick-up she would give her location away. The Americans were probably already wondering what was going on.

He was just a child.

General Shearer had been unequivocal. No compromise. She had to get the job done.

If Wu was taking care of them, wasn’t he bound to return? But that might not be for hours. Unless he heard the gunshot. She peered out the boy’s window, but couldn’t make out any movement on Wu’s side of the fence.

“Come on you bastard, show yourself,” she muttered impatiently. Each second she waited was time she didn’t have.

There was no sign of him.

She smiled at the boy and backed out of the room, pulling the bedroom door shut behind her. The child immediately began to wail. She opened the door and hissed at him to be quiet. But he was frightened now. He wanted to be heard.

Max gathered him up and lay him down on his bed. She picked up a small brown teddy bear lying next to him and held it to the boy’s face. He grabbed the bear and tried to move it away, so she held it down over him firmly. She lifted the muzzle of her Browning and took out boy and bear with a single slug.

By the time she returned to the kitchen, Wu Yaoqing was standing in his backyard.

Now he comes.

He caught sight of Maxine and began running toward the fence. He stepped through a man-sized gap in the wooden palings and onto the deck outside the kitchen. Max opened the door to the deck to meet him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

She held a finger to her lips and ushered him inside. He looked down at the pistol still in her right hand and jumped past her, spotting the woman’s body on the floor. Wu knelt down beside the body and began to cry.

“Why you do this?”

“She was trying to kill me.”

“No,” he insisted. “She was just trying to protect… her son.”

He looked up at Maxine accusingly. She didn’t need to tell him the boy was dead. Wu let out a guttural moan of anguish that nearly knocked her from her feet.

“Is this why you’ve been riding your bicycle home each night? How long did you think you could keep it up?”

“They needed me. They trusted me.”

He was right about the need. She had her doubts about the trust. The Blanks had been stripped of humanity. They ran on fear and base instinct. Trust didn’t figure highly on that pyramid of requirement. These days it was pretty low on everyone’s list.

“You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

“Not as dangerous as you might think.”

“I’m amazed your boss allows this.”

“He turns a blind eye. Mr Yang says in times like this we must show ‘gei mainzi’. We must all act with honour.”

“I’m sorry,” she said emptily.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“My name’s Captain Maxine Warrington. I’m here on behalf of the director of Australian Defence Intelligence, Major General Neil Shearer.

“He wants to meet with Mr Yang tomorrow morning.”

From a kilometre above the tangled mess there was a peculiar sort of beauty to the devastation. The way the waves dazzled in the reflected glass, impossibly filling all the spaces in between the metal skeletons and tumbled mortar ruins. The Gold Coast was no more. The map had been trashed and the boundaries between land and sea redrawn. It was as if Atlantis had resurfaced from the hidden depths of a watery grave.

There was a part of Captain Stone Luckman that derived a grim satisfaction from what had gone down. This was his land, his people’s land, though he might just be the last Kombumerri man alive to stake the claim. His father would have called it payback, except he too had been lost in the maelstrom. The land had been reclaimed, and in his eyes at least it was an act of God that honoured the names of all the saltwater people who were murdered in the name of white progress.

Their history had remained forgotten for too long. They never taught such things when he was at school but his grandparents were the keepers of the stories. They filled his young head with the legacy, said he must never forget the blood that had been spilt. The innocent men who were shot down like dogs by the Queensland Native Police for daring to maintain a claim on land that had nurtured the Kombumerri for thousands of years.

In the Australia of the 1860s, Aboriginal people were viewed more like feral pests than human beings. To the white settlers who claimed their stake in Kombumerri tribal lands Luckman’s ancestors were little more than wild animals to be tamed or wiped out. As America’s Union forces fought the Confederates over the immorality of slavery, half a world away across the Pacific Ocean a far more sinister civil war was waged. Aboriginal people were something lower than slaves for a slave at least had economic value.

The slaughter of his people had been so one-sided in force and rhetoric that the murderers were hailed as heroes.

By the 1990s, such repugnant truths were dismissed by a white prime minister as the black armband view of history. But the people of the Gold Coast had already long forgotten, so adept had they become at turning a blind eye. Over the course of his life Luckman had watched as the Gold Coast became a mecca to human avarice and greed, a haven for criminals and bent police and racist bastards in white shoes who viewed the past as something to be demolished with a wrecking ball like it had never existed.

Now the circle had closed. Their flawed notion of progress had been swept away by the relentless force of nature. But in the weeks since that awful day, Luckman had come to realise he found little solace in karmic justice. His coping mechanism had instead driven him toward focusing on survival. He had willed himself into an obsessional search for those still clinging to life in the rubble of all that once was.

He would never forget.

The Black Hawk had begun to bank to the north on its return journey down the coast as a radio call came in.

“Searcher 210, do you copy?”

His pilot, Lieutenant Eddie Bell, responded with his usual cool detachment. “210, over.”

“Searcher 210 status, over.”

“All clear, over.”

“We have a weather warning…”

Captain Luckman tuned out. He struggled once more to shift his body to relieve the ache in his left leg. There was never enough room in this thing to get comfortable. He was just over six feet tall and moderately well built, but in the minds of the Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation’s designers he was obviously a giant.

He didn’t give a damn about the Army’s weather report. Bell had spotted the storm clouds a good 10 minutes ago. These days the weather made everyone skittish, as if the Earth had somehow developed the capacity to whip up a storm with untold speed and ferocity. More than ever before the forces of nature were to be feared and avoided at all costs. Admittedly, flying a mothballed Black Hawk with a crew of two would always mean it was best to err on the side of caution. Especially as Luckman was no pilot. If something happened to Bell they both died. Just as well no-one was shooting at them.

He was weary to the core. Despite the mind-numbing effort of each day upon day he had been struggling to sleep. He’d said nothing to anyone. No point, really. No-one had the time for his petty problems. If forced to acknowledge it, the Army would prescribe sleeping tablets before simply dismissing it as post-traumatic stress disorder. Safe to assume everyone now suffered the effects of PTSD to some degree.

Everyone except the Blanks.

That the Army had accepted him back no questions asked was a mark of how far the tide had shifted in Government and Defence circles. In the years since he’d quit the Overseas Information Service Luckman’s activities had shaped him into what authorities described euphemistically as a person of interest. A dissident. While for now he was welcome back in the fold they would take no responsibility for his mental health – despite his war record, and the years spent in the service of his country. At the first sign of trouble he’d be cut adrift. For the time being, however, their interests intersected.