XIX. Swear It’s True
This is a crisis I knew had to come
Destroying the balance I’d kept…
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Tauranga, Bay of Plenty
May 29, 1984
The Analyst entered the room carrying a mug of tea (which tasted like it had already passed through the rest of the Department, but it kept him chipper) and wearing a smile which was less tired than most. He was actually pleased to be in today; he’d been worked to the bone in the run-up to the war, and had been bundled out of Wellington after the Russians rolled through the Fulda Gap, but seen bugger-all action since. No more cables and troop movements for him; he got to help the blokes in Palmy deal with lists and figures and supplies of ink for printing ration cards (
nine years if newspapers are cut to levels set out in Schedule C; six if the Press
and ODT
and Star
and other periodicals are permitted to resume printing within assumed timeframes absent restrictions recommended by...Jesus, it’s burnt into my mind now. So this is madness, Roger.). Hardly the exciting life a twenty-three-year-old wanted from a career in the intelligence community.
But not today! Oh, this day of days! For the four-week quarantine on the American ships which had entered the port was over, and the Heroes of the Pacific were getting to stretch their legs; right up to the door of his merry little office. And so it was that today the Analyst got to wade into the messy world of diplomacy.
“Get you anything, Captain? Tea, coffee, a biscuit? Not like any of the three have been easy to come by recently but, well, we get along.”
“No thank you. Sir.”
“Well, there’s water of course, should you need it.” An apologetic look outside. “Not like we have a lack of that today, a-ha-ha.”
The American remained solemn in grimy dress whites, his mouth a tight line beneath wary and weary eyes, head capped by a fresh buzz cut.
Do they all come like this? I wonder if the Americans have a biscuit cutter somewhere where they mould officers out of human beings. Ah, hell, he’s still staring at me. Uh…
“Ah…well, shall we get to it, then?” The Analyst clicked his pen and flourished a notepad genially. The American remained unmoved. The faint smile on the New Zealander’s face grew a little more manic.
No, it couldn’t be easy, could it? That’d be far
too much to ask. “Right, you are Lieutenant Commander Rhett Dinsenbacher, United States Navy?”
“Yes.”
“Commanding officer
USS Merrill?”
“Acting.”
“And your predecessor?”
“Commander Newman, died on the day the exchange occurred.” The cold blue eyes stared into the Analyst’s eyes, into his mind and soul, and passed through the other side clearly unimpressed with what they found. “Heart attack.”
“Ah…condolences,” Roger replied weakly. “Um…can you describe your mission?”
“Classified.”
“You realise you’re in an allied country, don’t you Commander?” He didn’t say it peevishly, but rather in the eagerly friendly tone of a five-year-old. Much like a five-year-old, Roger pressed on with his clumsy attempt at persuasion completely oblivious to the Commander’s reticence. “And I’m an intelligence officer for said country, so you can…you can…um.”
A brick wall greeted him.
“Classified. Sir. I’m awaiting a debrief with military officers of your country.” The faintest emphasis on the word ‘military’; not enough so’s you could take offence, no, but plenty to get the point across. Roger blinked once, twice, then smiled again, the pleasant, empty smile of a man way out of his depth trying to keep it all together.
Now that he thought about it, he’d seen that smile a lot these last few months.
Undeterred, Roger continued his line of questioning, and managed about three more answers over the next twenty minutes. Then a knock came at the door.
“Uh, en-enter,” Roger said.
“Ah, Roger,” said a silky, sibilant voice as the door opened to reveal the man from the SIS. “Entertaining our esteemed visitor, I take it? Sir,” he added, touching two fingers briefly to his brow before his vulpine, yellowy eyes flickered back to the Analyst. “Shouldn’t you be down in Kawerau, Roger, making sure we keep a steady stream of arsewipes coming our way? The local rag’s far too stiff, for one,” he said airily, the slightest tilt to his head making it so that he was speaking down to the Analyst without being so vulgar as to make it obvious. The upshot was that Roger felt suddenly as if he was intruding, never mind the very explicit memoranda and letters and phone calls he’d received to make it clear that he was meant to be here. After a wide-eyed silence, it occurred to him to say something, if his tongue could be convinced to go along with it.
Unfortunately, in the heat of the moment his tongue decided not to meet his mind halfway on the issue, and so he ended up stammering his way along like an alcoholic stroke victim.
“Well, you see, I…ah…that is, I got orders from Christchurch…and I, uh…um.”
Brilliant, Roger. Putting that English minor to good use, I see.
“Is that a fact? Well, it looks like you’ve been” a brief, sharp inhalation “superseded.” He glanced at the American, who was watching the proceedings with what you could almost mistake for interest, and shrugged. “But, if you care to continue assisting me in my debriefing of our guest, so be it.”
Jespersen sloughed off his unmarked coat and sat heavily in the chair next to Roger. All of his attention was subsequently focused solely at the American.
“So, Commander Dinsenbacher, U.S. Navy, number…” he rattled off a series of digits which Roger couldn’t have hoped to remember without reference to paper or writing on his hand “you’re no doubt curious as to why you’ve been, for want of a more diplomatic word, ‘interned’ at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Yes? Well,” he said, “I find the formalities of all this as interminable as you do; but even after the end of the world we’re stuck with bean-counters and paper-pushers who insist that we dot every bloody ‘i’ and cross every bloody ‘t.’ So I’ve been dragged out here in the rain to ask you the same questions MFA and the Army and Cabinet – oh yes, believe me, there are folks in Christchurch who want to talk to
you, no two ways about it – the questions which they are going to ask you
ad bloody
nauseam.
“So let’s cut to the chase, Commander; I’m going to ask you a few very simple questions about yourself, your vessel, its occupants, and what all of the above have been doing in their pleasure cruise across the Pacific for the last four months. After that, you’re free to join the rest of your crew, who’ve been sequestered in a hotel up the road.” A pallid smile. “Only the cleanest of sheets and hottest of dinners for the Heroes of the Pacific; we’re not animals. So if you’d care to tell me a little something about your encounter with those Red bastards” the curse sounded infinitely harsher in his cultured tones than the roughest backcountry cow cocky could ever have made them “we can both get to somewhere we’d rather be.”
A clock ticked once, twice, thrice. Dinsenbacher blinked once, twice, thrice, infinitely more slowly. And then, Roger’s heart leaping into his mouth, he began to speak.
“We were leaving Yokosuka on the evening of the 21st…”
It would be some time before Roger left to write up his report.
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Doubting, unsettling, and turning around,
Wondering what would come next…
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Te Aroha, Waikato
June 7, 1984
It was a Friday, so theoretically the working week was over. The old sayings about work never being done still held, apparently; if anybody in the Waikato had ever heard that phrase, they didn’t let it show. Life continued into the weekend at the same sedately busy pace, at once boring and difficult.
Rain again. The men were all out regardless, chasing cows in for milking, as the women were kept indoors for kitchen duty. The hand of women’s lib, it appeared, was yet to set foot in the district, something Mel took exception to.
“If any of these arrogant sheep-shaggers pulled their heads outta their arses,” she snarled as she flung a potato into the pot with particular aplomb, blasting water upwards as if it were a depth charge “they might be able to see that a pair of tits doesn’t mean you can’t point a fucking cow at a fucking gate and fucking well get it fucking milked.”
Grace didn’t really see any good response to that. Instead she shrugged and kept her eyes on the spud she was handling. The food was no more interesting than at the camp, but there was more of it and, well, the matriarchal old bizzum who oversaw dinner duty did seem to take a certain pride in her craft, so if the rations were repetitive they were at least well-cooked.
Speaking of the devil, Eileen had stumped her way in while they contemplated their potatoes. Christ alone knew how someone built like a brick shithouse managed to move so quietly, but the old lady drifted up behind you like a bad smell (though the faint aroma of carbolic soap and shortbread tended to give her away first, if the wind was right). And if she’d heard any of what they were saying…a shared glance and steadily reddening cheeks indicated that the same thought had occurred to Mel. Their eyes flickered towards the old woman as her sunbeaten and weatherworn saddle of a face split like a pickled walnut into a gaptoothed grin.
“Don’t you worry,” she said knowingly “come September, when they’re back to milking twice a day, you’ll get plenty of chances to prove yourself. You think those lazy sods are going to keep waking up at half four if they don’t have to?” A squawk of a laugh punctuated her speech as she described her husband and grandsons and the young men from Auckland who’d also seen themselves transplanted south as one. “No bloody fear; I shouldn’t be surprised if you get more done each than the lot of them put together!”
The girls were equally stumped, until Mel had the presence of mind to smile and laugh along. Grace joined in too, half a beat late. Eileen had business in mind, though, of course, and promptly asked Grace if she could check on the washing and see if it was ready to be slung on the wooden frame hanging from the ceiling and left to dry. Hiding her reluctance, she readily agreed and dried her hands on a teatowel before heading through the house.
It wasn’t that Grace minded doing the laundry – yeah, it was boring and repetitive, but it was better than going out and sowing seeds for cabbage and cauliflower and silverbeet in the cold and mud – but going to the laundry, which lay at the rear of the old farmhouse, meant going past the main bathroom.
Which she was doing right about
now. Grace consciously yet subconsciously tried to avert her gaze from the open door (
dammit it has to be open doesn’t it why does it have to be open), but still caught a glimpse out the corner of her eye of the pallid sunlight filtering through the patterned glass and illuminating the bath.
The last time she’d seen a bathtub like that – in the exact same position relative to everything else in the room, lit a certain way by the sunlight, even having the same taps – it had had her mother’s still-warm blood-soaked corpse in it.
It didn’t always do it, but the lighting and Grace’s subdued mood of the day meant this was one of the times it set her off. She was breathing heavily by the time she reached the laundry, and fell into a lean against the washing machine as her hands began trembling. She didn’t know how long she was there for, but when Eileen came in to ask after her, a rebuke for shiftlessness dying on her lips as she saw Grace stood stonily, she didn’t hear the first couple of times her name was called. Then reality flooded back to her. An instant later, so did the tears.
Eileen’s mood pivoted to consolation, her hand – soft and leathery and wrinkled and hard all at once after untold decades of hard work – rested itself on Grace’s shoulder, and she began to ask what was wrong. She didn’t get much of an answer. Nobody, Grace thought, would understand if she told them, or they’d think she was some silly city girl if she did.
Outside, a long, cold night fell.
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People who change for no reason at all
It’s happening all of the time…
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Christchurch, Canterbury
June 9, 1984
It was another surprisingly hot day in the capital (no, it still felt wrong to say), with the mercury creeping up towards twenty Centigrade.
So much for nuclear winter, Palmer thought as Frank O’Flynn read out the latest report young Mister Dasent from Foreign Affairs had written on the interviews with the interned American sailors.
“…which makes a total of two hundred and seven locations confirmed ‘out,’ if we add all that to the list of places in the
Perth Report and what the Indians told us about China.”
Some weren’t surprising: Guam, Pearl Harbour, Tokyo, Yokosuka, Seoul, Okinawa, Manila, and so forth. The least significant place Palmer figured he’d heard of having being hit would have to have been tiny Truk, all tucked away up there in Micronesia.
C’est la guerre.
Lange’s fingers engulfed a pen as he fidgeted with it, the sunlight streaming in through the window occasionally reflecting off the metal and glaring in McLay’s eyes. That might have been an accident, but nobody in the room would’ve bet on it if asked. As the Attorney-General tried to act like it wasn’t annoying him (again, a losing bet if ever there was one), David asked a question.
“So how in the hell did the Yanks make it on their own with the oilers for better than two months? Surely they’d been attached to a battlegroup; what happened to the rest of them?”
The answers were predictably dismal: “on scant rations” in the first case. As to the second case, they’d been cycling back into action after replenishment at Yokosuka and were far enough out to escape the annihilation of the Tokyo metropolis, but had lost contact with the rest of Seventh Fleet and struck out for Guam after observing the degradation of the situation in Japan.
Now there was a question from Bill Birch: Why hadn’t they returned to base? Or at least to a surviving US territory?
Because, O’Flynn said, they’d been simply unable to find safe harbour anywhere else. They’d spent the better part of their journey under cover to keep safe from fallout plumes all across the North Pacific, and had only encountered signs of friendly life around Tuvalu.
“Did they ever break radio silence?” asked Palmer, his interest piqued. “Be helpful to know what – well, if anything else is, you know – out there at all.”
“Three times. Once during the Exchange, to see what the hell was going on with the fleet, once on approach to Fiji, and once as they approached Nauru, of all places. Apparently they bumped the Yanks onwards to us.”
“Can’t blame ‘em,” chipped in Lange. “They’re running short on most of everything up there; last thing they’ll want is more mouths coming in wanting fed.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Colin Moyle.
“Frank?”
“The Navy’s pretty chuffed with an oiler falling into their laps, but we’re trying to be careful of planning anything that might require it until we’ve either got contact with something even vaguely resembling a central authority stateside, or – and let’s be honest, this one’s more likely – we get the Americans to agree to work with us. Call it secondment or something.”
“Ah, correct me if I’m wrong, Frank,” interjected Birch “but isn’t that precisely what the Poms did to the Aussies with
Perth? ‘Cause that isn’t a recipe for popularity, if Bob Hawke’s editorialising on the Perth Report is anything to go by.”
O’Flynn ummed and aahed over that one for a moment, before Lange stepped in.
“The difference is, Bill, that the Aussies were going over there to see whether there was enough left to send aid and then report back home, before being held hostages to it. The Americans came here because there was nowhere else for them and it was submit to internment or starve.”
“Not to mention,” said Frank, “that we have a formal security alliance with the Americans, and it’s not unreasonable to ask more of them than Corsham asked of the Australians. We aren’t going to push them too far into doing anything they don’t want to – we’re operating under the assumption that the Americans have at least a vestigial central government, and it’d be received tremendously badly if we acted in poor faith towards their sailors.”
“Speaking of, when can we expect to hear back from the convoy?”
“Ah…” O’Flynn checked his briefing papers “they should be there by now failing all but the worst eventualities. There are no scheduled shortwave check-ins until Monday. We should know more by then, subject to what kind of mood the British are in and whether our fellows think it prudent to send anything particularly juicy over the wires. Even then, the chaps at DSIR aren’t sure if the ionospheric conditions in the Northern Hemisphere have returned to normal. We shall just have to wait and see.”
If the prospect thrilled anyone in the room, they didn’t let on. For the time being, there was a briefing to be heard and work to be done. The transmission line reconstruction in Wellington was being hampered by uncertain weather, but the fallout was dying down to survivable levels in all but the innermost areas of Ground Zero. Auckland was even more encouraging, with arterial routes cleared as far as Spaghetti Junction. Nobody would be living in Parnell anytime soon, but in a year or three…it was just a matter of time.
Waiting was hell.
Christchurch, Canterbury
June 14, 1984
A knock on the door, and a man entered with a piece of paper, a uniform, a fresh face and a salute.
“Sir, we just got a message over the secure channel.”
The only sound was two dozen spines stiffening. The Prime Minister’s hands shook just the barest amount as he faced the messenger.
“What did they have to say?”
“Ah, just the one word, sir. ‘Pilgrimage’.”
A stunned blink preceded a manic smile of relief, which spread through the room like weaponised smallpox.
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Back out of my duties; when all’s said and done
I know that I’ll lose every time…
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PILGRIMAGE/PILGRIMAGE
PHASE 2 TRANSIT OF VENUS CONCLUDED. NZDF CONTINGENT ASHORE ASSISTING WITH AID DISPERSAL. GODWIT RETURNING W REPORT ON OTAGO THIS MONTH. SITREP ATTACHED FOR CABINET ONLY.
RSA CENT GOVT INCOMMUNICADO. PRETORIA, JBURG, CAPETOWN HIT. HAILED SAA FORCE PT ELIZABETH, CONFIRMS ONGOING CIVIL WAR. MARITZBURG LOST TO INSURGENTS. UNDERSTAND GAS HAS BEEN USED. HEAVY CIV CASUALTIES BOTH SIDES IF SADF TO BE BELIEVED, NO CONTACT W OFFICERS ABOVE 0-4. SCOUT FLIGHT REPORTED RADAR LOCK OVER WALVIS BAY, WITHDREW SAFELY.
REST OF AFRICA VARYING DEGREES DISORDER. ENCOUNTERED BRAZILIAN FRIGATE EN ROUTE ASCENSION, CONFIRMS BRASILIA HIT BUT BRAZIL GOOD OVERALL. ARGENTINE SITUATION DETERIORATING. BA COMPLETE LOSS. DEAD UNCOUNTABLE EST 2 MIL. REFUGEES FLOODING MONTEVIDEO. NO OTHER FRIENDLIES ENCOUNTERED TIL SPAIN. CAPE VERDE ISLANDS IN ANARCHY, FIRES VISIBLE.
CONF MADEIRA SURVIVED, NO COMMS W PORT GOVT: LISBON, PORTO, LAJES, SETUBAL OUT. RN ESCORT CONF SPAN GOVT IN TOLEDO BUT LOST MADRID, CADIZ, CORUNA, VIGO. BETTER OFF THAN PORT SAY SOURCES.
BRITISH LOSSES AS EXPECTED. CONFIRM PERTH REPORT IN ENTIRETY. RE ROI DUBLIN GONE CENT GOVT IN CORK.
CORSHAM ADMIN GOING WELL. SITUATION MORE STABLE THAN EXPECTED. MARTIAL LAW, RATIONING MEAN MINIMAL UNREST SEEN.
CONUS DAMAGE SEVERE. ZERO CONTACT SINCE FEB 21. GODWIT BRINGS DETAILS NATO CONVOPS UPON RETURN, WILL DISCLOSE BEFORE CAB CLOSED SESSION.
GOD DEFEND NEW ZEALAND.
PILGRIMAGE/PILGRIMAGE
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Or pass through the deserts and wastelands once more
And watch as they drop by the beach…