various water boards had been moaning about declining water tables. It could rain all it wanted during the winter, but given just three days of good old heartwarming sunshine in July and these jokers would start leaping up and down, and tearing their hair, and sticking in meters and standpipes, and demanding that people should save water by cutting down on their bathing and putting bricks in their water closet cisterns… and so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. What a load of crap, zfyou could afford to take one! It was Nature all those years, warning us that the Big One was coming.
'Well, in 2007 in England it came, and that year we didn't have a summer…'
'It was washed out?' Jake felt obliged to ask. 'It was drowned out!' Harvey told him.
'I seem to remember something about that,' Jake said. 'But I missed it. I was on the Continent.'
'But you must have read about it, seen it on TV?' 'I told you, I was doing my own thing. On the Continent.' 'Yeah,' Harvey agreed. 'About the only place in the world where the weather was moderately normal. You were lucky. But in England it rained, and rained, and rained! And as for declining water tables: forget it. There's been no shortage of water ever since. Anywhere below sea level turned into a swamp. The Thames Barrier failed, and high tides combined with a flooded river to drown the city six feet deep. Through July, August, and September — shit, there were gondolas in Oxford Street! Okay, so I'm exaggerating — maybe it wasn't quite as bad as all that, but it was bad enough. And I could go on and on. Except…' He paused again.
'Except that was the UK,' Jake helped him out. 'And the
people had plenty of warning, and there was little or no loss of life. Yes, I remember it now. But we were talking about Brisbane, not quite so close to home.'
'Not just Brisbane,' the other told him. 'In 2007 it was Australia as a whole. Now, you've got to remember that in Australia the climate works backwards to how we'd expect back home. It's way hotter in January than in July: the difference between summer and winter, right? Oh, really? Well, in 2007 everything went wrong. From February on the summer weather held, there was no winter and it didn't get any colder. Just like now, in fact exactly like now, they had the freakiest of freak weather.'
Turning his head, Harvey gazed out through the limo's one-way windows at suburbs becoming city. 'I mean, just take a look out there.'
Jake looked, lifted an enquiring eyebrow. 'Well?'
'Dry, brittle, parched. Those gardens that should be green are more like miniature deserts. The grass is withered to straw and the leaves are dead on the trees and bushes. Almost all the swimming pools are empty, and you won't see anyone watering any lawns. It should be a maximum of sixty, sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit out there, but it's well over eighty, and this is late afternoon. And naturally, it's an official drought. Perfect!'
'Perfect for what?' Now Jake was really puzzled… not to mention tired of this circuitous route they were taking to the Great Fire.
'Earth Year!' said Harvey. 'The big conference that starts tomorrow right here in Brisbane, billed as the ultimate ecological summit meeting. Synchronicity at work again, or maybe not. Naturally they chose this place, because of the fire.'
'Well, you've lost me again,' Jake told him. 'And we still haven't got to the fire itself.'
The other shrugged apologetically. 'I'm sorry — it's this grasshopper mind of mine. Start me on a subject, it devours me. Okay, the fire:
'It was the weirdest thing ever — a one-of-a-kind sort of thing, or at least everyone hopes so. 2007, and we thought we'd seen it all: the worst tornadoes the USA had ever suffered, the worst floods, the strangest fluctuations and reversals of climate right across the world, with Australia taking the brunt of it. But no, we hadn't seen it all.
'Brisbane was like a tinderbox. The whole east coast from Rockhampton to Canberra — normally a green strip in the lee of the Great Dividing Range, with no water shortage and an excellent annual rainfall — was bone dry from this drought that had lasted for eighteen months. Oh, they'd had rain, but all of it had fallen on the wrong side of the Great Divide! And daily the temperature was up in the hundreds.
'And it was then that it happened. It was like… what, a tornado? An almighty tornado, a whirlwind, yes. But a whirlwind of fire! Ma Nature, Jake, getting all hot under the collar. It started in the Gidgealpa and Moomba oil and gas fields, but how or why it started, no one knows. There are various theories but, like I said, no one really knows. Though miles apart, suddenly the oil wells and gas installations became the epicentre of an enormous fireball. That in itself was a disaster, but nothing like what was to come.
'A fireball, vast, hot, rushing up on its own thermals, and sucking in the air to fuel itself; sucking the air into a self-perpetuating spiral, a superheated whirlwind. It swept east out of the Sturt Desert, its base widening out as it came, a column of fire five and then ten miles across. At more than a hundred miles an hour it hit a place called Dirranbandi and burned the entire town, just took it out. And everything it burned fuelled the fire, that got hotter and hotter. And on it came. The thing moved like a drunkard — never in a straight line but just exactly like a tornado — a pillar of fire reaching up through the clouds. 'Of course it was monitored, thousands of people reported seeing it. It came terrifyingly close to some towns, scorching them but leaving them intact; then again it seemed to swoop on
others, tossed them into the sky in blazing rags. Firefighters tried to plot its course from the air; some airplanes flew too close and got sucked in, incinerated. And rotating ever faster, it rushed east to refuel itself on the Alton oil field…
'So it goes, and I can't remember all of it. But who would want to? Anyway, the whole thing was on every TV channel. Every Aussie there ever was watched it happening, couldn't do a thing about it. The authorities thought the mountains would stop it — they were wrong. It blazed across the Divide, leaving a smoking track twelve miles wide in its wake, with secondary fires still ranging outwards. The latter would burn for weeks until torrential rains stopped them.
'And with only an hour's warning to the people of Brisbane — an indefinite warning at that, for no one could say for sure what this thing would do — finally it hit, this firestorm from hell, such as the world had never before seen. Never before and never since, thank God!
'Everything that could burn burned. If it couldn't burn it calcined. And if it couldn't calcine it melted. As for the Brisbane River: forget it. It was running at a trickle and had been for a nine-month. The firestorm took what was left of the river water, turned it to steam in a couple of seconds and kept right on going.
'And that was it: a one-hundred-miles-per-hour blast furnace had killed a city and everyone it it who couldn't or hadn't tried to get out following the warning. They hadn't all died by burning; a great many people, gone underground or into cellars, suffocated because the fire needed their air. All of it. Then:
'The thing hit the sea and sucked up a waterspout into its raging funnel. The water put the fire out, turned to steam, and formed clouds. The clouds drifted inland and rained on the raging inferno that had been Brisbane. Finally it was over. End of story…'
… And after a while:
'Christ!' Jake said, under his breath. And a moment later:
'That is some encyclopedic memory you've got there, Jimmy. What are you, an authority on world disasters?'
Harvey shrugged a little selfconsciously — perhaps sheepishly? — and said, 'Me? No — but I know a woman who is. Before we broke camp, I had to talk to HQ about a couple of communications problems. Millicent Cleary was on Duty Officer. She's our current affairs lady; she has that kind of memory, keeps a mental record of just about everything that's going or gone down. As lan Goodly knows the future, she knows the recent past; but of course she has a big advantage: like, it's already happened. And unlike lan's her knowledge comes in amazing detail. So when I told her we'd be setting up next in Brisbane, she clued me in on the city, the fire, the Earth Year Conference. And there you have it: the fire's still fresh in my mind from my conversation with Millicent Cleary.'
Harvey sat back and looked out of his window. After a moment's silence he said, 'But actually, I wish it wasn't…'
In the other limo, the episode of the tall, thin plane-spotter (if that was what he had been) had been forgotten by everyone except Liz Merrick. She, too, was trying to put it to the back of her mind, but knew she'd be able to recall it if or when it was required — His silhouette etched on her memory: his angular shape. And the tilt of his broad-brimmed hat, that kept the sun out of his eyes. The way his binoculars were trained on… trained on what, a mainly empty sky? That was what had been bothering her! That, and the way those glasses had suddenly dipped., turning towards the limo.
