‘Good to know,’ Jack said as he got up to leave. ‘Thanks for the tea, Wally. We’ll come by again soon.’
A year later, in December 2007, early one morning, Wally would turn his telescope southward and watch—both curious and alarmed—as hundreds of Chinese paratroopers floated down from the sky in the direction of Jack’s farm.
The radio had said it was an exercise, but Wally wasn’t so sure.
But then, shortly after the paratroopers had landed out that way, Wally saw Jack’s big black plane take off and fly away to the northwest, so he figured Jack was fine.
A few months after that, Jack returned, and for some reason took all his stuff from his farm and moved to another one in the Simpson Desert.
Before he left, he stopped by to see Wally and Wally was grateful for the visit.
Over the next few years, Jack would call him on the phone occasionally, but old Wally was sad to see Jack and his little family go.
He’d enjoyed their visits and nobody else visited him anymore.
NINE YEARS LATER
FIERY CROSS REEF
SOUTH CHINA SEA
EYES ONLY: DESTROY AFTER READING
| SOURCE: | CHINESE STATE SECURITY AGENCY |
| TRANSLATION: | MANDARIN to ENGLISH |
| VOICE 1: | Sir, we have Mr Ferguson in custody. |
| VOICE 2: | Where are you holding him? |
| VOICE 1: | The military airfield on Fiery Cross Reef. |
| VOICE 2: | Did you get his hard drive, too? |
| VOICE 1: | Yes, sir. |
| VOICE 2: | I’m on my way. Before we kill Mr Ferguson, we must know everything that he picked up on his scans and find out if he told anyone. Commence the interrogation. Do not be gentle. |
Chinese Military Airfield
Fiery Cross Reef, South China Sea
2016
(A few days before the Great Games)
An elongated thread of bloody spittle stretched from Wally Ferguson’s chin down to his blue singlet.
He also had two black eyes and a broken nose.
The previous night, he’d been kidnapped from his remote farm in the Australian desert by a team of masked soldiers who’d whisked him away in a plane.
A four-hour trip on the plane had followed, bringing him here.
He didn’t know it, but ‘here’ was a remote hangar at a military base in the South China Sea.
In the nine years since he’d been neighbours with Jack, old Wally had become even quirkier.
He had embraced the Internet and, using his homemade equipment at his farm, he would listen in on space missions launched by the Americans in Florida, the Europeans in French Guiana and, most of all, the Chinese out of the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Hainan Island at the top of the South China Sea.
His reports of these missions, which he posted on online forums like Reddit, were widely regarded as the paranoid ravings of a conspiracy theorist who’d read too many science fiction novels.
Now, as Wally sat in that Chinese military base on Fiery Cross Reef, flanked by the six Chinese special forces soldiers who had crossed into Australian sovereign territory to kidnap him, he shook his head in disgust.