Dead and Kicking Read online

  I didn’t get it wrong too often, though – I’d learned not to. In my other job, the one nobody is supposed to know about, if you got it wrong the result could be a lot worse than just a nasty look from a sound recordist. It could get you hurt, and hurt bad. In fact, it could be downright fatal.

  THREE

  My other job, working for D.E.D., also involves getting the necessary shots without being sprung. The Directorate for Extra-territorial Defence is a top-secret Australian government intelligence-gathering department whose agents operate undercover as globe-trotting news photographers for the totally legit WorldPix International photo agency. Around 10 per cent of WorldPix snappers are spies, and the rest of the photographers and everyone else at WorldPix are unaware of the double life led by the undercover bods, or Dedheads, as we like to be called.

  Setting up the WorldPix photo agency to provide cover for D.E.D. operatives had been my idea. The inspiration came from an early undercover assignment I’d done for D.E.D. in Afghanistan in the eighties, when I’d posed as a freelance wildlife photographer. Not only did I get my assigned shots of the Mujahadeen guerrillas using CIA-supplied Stinger anti-aircraft missiles against the Soviet invaders for the first time, I also snapped a series of pictures of mountain goats that was published internationally in the geographic magazines and made me a nice little pile of money.

  It took some spirited arguing, but eventually those in charge in Canberra realised that not only could a picture agency be useful cover for D.E.D., it could also potentially pay its own way and perhaps even make a small profit. As it turned out, our talented photographers, spies and non-spies alike, began making very large profits right from the get-go.

  Since WorldPix had become an unqualified and highly lucrative success, every bureaucrat in Canberra, including my new boss, the Honourable Gwenda Felton AO, and our ultimate boss, the Minister for Defence, was anxious to bask in its glory.

  Gwenda Felton, Director-General of D.E.D., was a living, breathing demonstration of the law of physics which states that light travels faster than sound. At first sight she appeared to be a normal, if somewhat fashion-challenged, human being. When she opened her mouth, however, it was instantly clear that Gwenda’s grasp of reality was tenuous at best.

  My recent shouting match with Gwenda, and subsequent suspension, had resulted from her suggestion that the government consider severing all ties between D.E.D. and WorldPix, and just run the WorldPix side of things as a purely money-making operation. She would take over as chief executive, while the D.E.D. operatives, myself included, would be chucked out to fend for themselves in a very cold world.

  The idea was breathtaking in its short-sightedness and stupidity, and I’d made the mistake of telling her so. Gwenda may have been a political appointee with limited powers of reasoning but she had plenty of friends in high places, and I didn’t stand a chance. I was suspended from D.E.D. and she’d even pulled me from the WorldPix shooting roster. There was a brief moment when it seemed appropriate to punch her lights out, but I’d been brought up never to raise my hand to a lady, or even to someone like Gwenda.

  A recent change of government had forced Gwenda to put her privatisation plan on the back burner, as she, like all political appointees of the former government, was busy ducking for cover and frantically figuring out ways to save her skin. But I was still on suspension since I had very few friends in high places and Gwenda Felton really knew how to hold a grudge.

  When my mate Boxer heard about my suspension he made a few phone calls and landed me a job shooting stills for a feature film he was about to start working on in Vietnam. Byron Oxenbould was a much sought-after sound recordist and the film’s producers were happy to go along with his suggestion. After all, I had an international reputation as a photographer, I was available, and I’m always more than ready to hop on a plane to any place in the world that has great food.

  Which was why I was in the middle of the chaos of a film crew wrapping one last location somewhere in the Mekong Delta. I was tired, hot and sweaty, and looking forward to a shower and a couple of weeks of doing absolutely nothing. I’d just finished packing my cameras and lenses into their cases when Jack Smart yelled, ‘Hey, Murdoch. Fancy a lift back to the big smoke?’

  Ho Chi Minh City might be better called the Big Smog but the thought of getting there pronto, into some air-conditioning and scrubbing off the dirt under a hot hotel shower sounded just great. My lift back to the city would be in a sixties-vintage Huey helicopter, the same chopper that had zoomed low over the patrol earlier, right on cue, flown by Jack’s mate Van Tuan, or VT A man would be crazy to say no to an offer like that.

  Jack Smart was the film’s military advisor, the bloke who made sure all the actors and extras playing soldiers saluted with the correct hand, pointed the business ends of their rifles at the enemy in firefights and kept hold of the pin and chucked the hand grenade, rather than the other way round.

  Jack really was an ex-soldier and Vietnam veteran, as advertised, but there was a wee bit more to him than the rest of the crew knew. He was actually Jack Stark, an Aussie who’d been conscripted in the sixties, gone to Vietnam and risen through the ranks, got himself a battlefield commission and been promoted to major before being chucked out in disgrace for unspecified reasons.

  The behind-the-scenes reason for this well-publicised dishonourable discharge was to provide cover for a government false flag operation, in which Stark was set up as a bitter and deranged anti-government activist known as the Mad Major, living inside an isolated, booby-trap-protected compound on a hilltop in Far North Queensland.

  Stark, as planned, became a hero for many of the world’s emerging terrorist splinter groups, which made it easy for him to infiltrate them. When he eventually discovered that an extreme right-wing cabal with strong influence inside the Australian government had been using him for their own purposes, Stark jacked up, refusing to play along, and was marked for elimination. He was reported to have died in a massive explosion at his mountain hideout.

  The truth was that he now lived in Macau, where along with his mate VT he ran a boutique hotel called the Pousada do Estoril. Jack and the Australian government had apparently agreed to a truce, allowing him to stay dead in peace. I figured this meant that Jack had a lot of embarrassing dirt on some very highly placed people.

  The movie we were working on, Lost in Action, was a dramatisation of the life and death of another Vietnam soldier, Major Peter Cartwright VC. Cartwright had gone into Vietnam early on as part of the Australian army training team, serving through to 1969. He’d gone missing, presumed killed, in a battle up near the border with North Vietnam. Cartwright had been recommended for the Victoria Cross a few months before his death when he’d called in an air strike on his own position as his unit was about to be overrun by the enemy.

  ‘Ballsy move on his part, and not always as suicidal as it sounds,’ Jack had explained one night over post-wrap drinks. ‘If you’re well dug in, and you know what’s coming, you stand a hell of a lot better chance than an enemy advancing towards you without cover over open ground.’

  Jack had worked with Cartwright for a brief period, and his knowledge of the late major together with his attention to detail had caused some friction on the set. Early on in the production, we’d shot a scene where Cartwright stood in a smoke-filled jungle clearing, valiantly blazing away with his Owen gun into masses of advancing North Vietnamese Army regulars to provide cover for the withdrawal of his patrol. Jack had a barney with the director about the actor playing Cartwright using a weapon like the Owen gun and standing up in the middle of a firelight.

  ‘Wouldn’t have done it, sunshine,’ Jack had argued, ‘not firing piss-weak 9mm ammo. I knew the bastard. We covered each other’s backs a few times and he wasn’t that dumb, not by a long chalk. Maybe we could have him using a cut-down L2A1.’

  The L2A1 was a heavy-barrelled, full-auto version of the 7.62mm standard-issue Oz Army’s self-loading rifle. The SAS chopped off t
he barrel, ditched the flash suppressor, stuck in a thirty-round mag and nicknamed it the Bitch. When you squeezed the trigger, you got enough flame and noise to scare the crap out of everyone within a couple of hundred metres, including the operator.

  ‘But the Owen gun is such a pretty-looking weapon, Jack,’ our 25-year-old wunderkind director had argued, ‘and you have to understand that looking good is what the film business is all about.’

  ‘It’s your show, mate,’ Jack had answered with a shrug. ‘No skin off my arse.’

  Up to that point in filming VT had been happy to fly the director back from location when the shoot wrapped for the day, but after that conversation there always seemed to be some kind of mechanical glitch that kept the helicopter grounded until after the director left on a long, painfully slow drive back to the city.

  The Huey was waiting in a clearing, the rotor blades slowly turning and VT in the pilot’s seat. We instinctively ducked our heads as we sprinted under the blades and Jack grabbed my heavy cases and easily hefted them into the chopper’s open rear cabin. He might have had silver-grey hair and been pushing sixty hard, but I reckoned he must have been almost as trim and fit as the day he first arrived in the ’Nam in ’67.

  After securing my cases to the Huey’s deck, I strapped myself into one of the frayed webbing seats in the rear cargo area while Jack climbed into the co-pilot’s seat and pulled on a helmet. As VT opened the throttle, the whine of the jet turbine engine increased in pitch and the massive rotor blades turned faster and faster. VT glanced back to check that my seatbelt was fastened and I gave him the thumbs up.

  There wasn’t too much about flying a Huey that VT didn’t know. He’d been a top helicopter pilot for the South Vietnamese Air Force during the war. Just before he pulled up on the control stick to get us airborne, he reached over and squeezed Jack’s thigh. Jack smiled and returned the gesture. VT had been Jack’s partner for the past thirty-five years.

  ‘Ain’t love grand,’ I said to myself, and then the Huey’s skids cleared the temporary landing ground in a choking whirlwind of dust and chaff and sticks and stones. Below us I could see the director and his personal assistant running towards the departing chopper, waving hopefully. I waved back as we climbed higher and they grew smaller and smaller.

  Since filming was finished in Vietnam, and the rented ex-US military chopper had to be handed back to the government within the week, it was odds-on that VT wouldn’t be able to resist one last chance to show me what a Huey could do. I tightened my seatbelt and ten seconds later I heard his voice in my headphones yelling, ‘Hang on, Alby. Here we go!’ And then my world turned upside down.

  FOUR

  The Hotel Indochine Luxe Royale had more words to its name than it had elevators, but was a nice place to shack up during the shoot. It had been built in the 1930s and, according to the brass plaque in the lobby, it was one of the many hundreds of hotels in Saigon where Graham Greene had stayed exclusively while researching The Quiet American. Restored to its original Art Deco glory in the 1990s, the hotel was centrally located, sedate and comfortable, and actually did have quite an interesting history.

  ‘Bugger me, the old Luxe Royale,’ Jack had said to me when we met a couple of days before filming began. ‘Biggest knocking shop in Saigon, back in the day.’

  I’d glanced around at the wood-panelled and plushly carpeted lobby with its rattan armchairs and potted palms. ‘Really? This place was a brothel?’

  ‘You better believe it, mate,’ Jack had said. ‘That plaque should read “On this site more GIs contracted the clap than in any other place in South-East Asia”. I think they used to have a giant, flashing neon sign up on the roof advertising penicillin.’

  My fourth-floor room had a small balcony opening onto a public square. It was a great place to unwind with a G & T after a long day and I was really going to miss the joint. Any bullet holes left by drunken partying American soldiers had long been papered over, along with those made by the Vietcong when they’d briefly taken the hotel during the ’68 Tet offensive. Today’s guests enjoyed king-sized beds, air-conditioning, 24-hour room service – now limited to food and booze only – and big marble bathrooms with plenty of hot water.

  I took a long shower while my images from the day’s shoot uploaded and downlinked to our production office on the Gold Coast and to MB&F, the movie’s marketing and PR people in New York. By the time I had towelled off and poured myself a whisky, my knees had stopped shaking from VT’s moves in the Huey. It made you wonder what the bloke could manage in an up-to-date attack chopper like an Apache or Super Cobra.

  There was an email in my inbox from Julie Danko, who was in the US attending a counter-insurgency seminar at the Battle Command Training Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. ‘Congratulations on not getting suspended, demoted or fired for eight straight weeks, Alby,’ the email read. ‘Is this a new record?’

  Julie worked with me at D.E.D. and had been my 2IC during the demoralising six-month stint I’d recently spent as acting Director-General. I had learnt a lot during that time, including the fact that I wasn’t cut out for management. I’d also learnt there was a lot more to Julie than met the eye – never mind that what met the eye was pretty spectacular.

  After carefully packing all my serious camera gear into travelling cases and my spare clothes into a suitcase, I phoned reception for a bellboy. My cases would be shipped back to the Gold Coast studios, along with the rest of the production’s equipment, but with a week or two to kill I planned on staying on in Vietnam. I’d travel light, with just a passport, a backpack, a compact Nikon DSLR and a couple of lenses in a small camera bag, plus my tiny digital Leica D-Lux in my pocket.

  When I wandered into the cocktail bar of the hotel just after nine there was a string quartet playing. Neatly dressed guests were sipping champagne and politely refusing canapés from passing waiters. The producer, director, screenwriter, various money men and the usual studio bods and hangers-on clocked me, immediately recognised that I wasn’t anybody important and went back to their networking.

  ‘I’ll help you with those, sport,’ I said, pinching a silver tray of deep-fried spring rolls from a waiter and kicking open the French doors leading out to where the real action was. ‘Cha gio, anyone?’ I yelled. ‘Get ’em while they’re hot.’

  The Doors’ ‘Love Her Madly’ was blasting out over an open marble terrace packed with crew and actors, local production office people, girlfriends, boyfriends and assorted camp followers. A film crew on location usually sorts itself into a number of temporary relationships, most of which don’t survive past the end of the shoot.

  My time in Vietnam had been romance-free, which Jack impolitely attributed to a lack of desperation on the part of the unattached female members of the crew. I’ll admit my track record with women hadn’t been too impressive lately. There’d been the stunning Major Grace Goodluck, who’d claimed to work for the US Justice Department and had loved me and left me after shooting our local CIA chief full of holes. And there’d been Lieutenant Clare Kingston, a US Navy weapons specialist who’d been kidnapped almost out of my bed to arm stolen nukes for a wealthy conservationist who had a bone to pick with the Japanese about whaling.

  Then, of course, there was Julie, who’d recently come between me and a dozen submachine gun bullets fired by a psycho ex-paratrooper named Chapman Pergo on a rocky island off the Tasmanian coast. Her bulletproof vest had saved us both and I’d blasted half a magazine from Julie’s MP5K in Pergo’s direction before SASR troopers had taken him out. After an incident involving some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, I was still trying to figure out exactly where I stood with Julie.

  In the middle of the crowded terrace I found Damien, the first assistant director, with Kirsten, who was doing make-up on the film. They’d met on a shoot a long time back and were recently married and looking amazingly happy.

  ‘Here’s a belated wedding present,’ I said, handing Damien the tray of spring rolls. ‘Knock yourselves out.�
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  Kirsten and Damien were chatting with Brett Tozer, one of the film’s associate producers. The old film-industry gag defines associate producers as people who are morally bankrupt enough to associate with the producer. In reality, no-one in the film business cares if anyone is morally bankrupt as long as they are liquid enough to kick in some cash. Brett’s employer, the New York PR and marketing conglomerate Markham Barkin & Fargo, had done just that, securing Brett his slot on the production. He seemed like a nice bloke, for a Yank, and we were getting along. He was wearing a suit I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Not more new threads?’ I said, as he helped himself to a couple of the spring rolls.

  Brett nodded. Soon after arriving in Saigon I’d introduced him to a local tailor who’d run me up a couple of very nice retro safari jackets, just like the ones all the butch war correspondents had worn in the 1960s. The bloke could also whip up an excellent made-to-measure business suit in less than three days. This had come in handy for Brett after he’d discovered on-set film catering is a never-ending feast and a real temptation for people with not much to do in the actual filmmaking process – like associate producers. My tailor friend was probably well on his way to owning a couple of new houses thanks to Brett’s constantly expanding waistline.

  Just behind Brett, my mate Boxer was sitting at a table sipping a cocktail and drinking in the adoring looks of a couple of local extras. With Boxer, girls always seemed to come in pairs, which I could never figure out. Who knew that a bloke who had the build of a Greek god, chiselled good looks, blond hair, blue eyes, a dry wit, charm and the air of a bad boy plus the glamour of a job in the film industry would attract women?