May Day (The Erelong Trilogy Book II)

The Banquet Hall

They had beaten all the odds and made it to Station. Now they were seated at a trestle table. Sitting among a good hundred diners, and several levels below ground. There had taken far too many risks and yet through it all, their luck held out. It was almost too much for Cameron. He fiddled nervously with the cutlery as he took in his surroundings.

The structure was only one of the many underground headquarters of the Party in Australia. At one time, it had been a real railway station, but after several decades it had fallen into disuse. The platforms and building on the surface had long since been removed, the still intact underground structure was simply known by the socialists and their close supporters as the Station.

The smell of roast beef and tobacco was undercut by a whiff of rusted metal and ozone. The last two betrayed the utilitarian original purpose of what was now called the Banquet Hall. The air pungent and yet it was also oddly exciting. In this place, people were filled with purpose and motivated by hope.

The brick ceiling curving above their heads shone with a fresh coat of white paint. It was once an underground platform and looked it. At either end, the tunnel openings where the trains once ran had been sealed by plywood walls and painted over. The ditch through which train tracks still ran was covered by plywood and timber flooring. It was squeaking hideously under the weight of the gathering but no one heard it over the noise of talking and laughter.

"What about Canberra and Pine Gap?" Cameron asked Tilford when she took her seat beside him.

She must have chosen to sit where she did to talk. And yet she had not uttered a single word of greeting. Instead, she engaged with her comrades' in their conversation as if she had always been a part of it.

"What?" She asked turning her head and staring at him with a look of surprise. The sharp glance she gave him said she didn't like to be interrupted.

"You sit beside me without so much as a greeting," Cameron told her with a bemused smile. "Some might call that rude. I was asking if you might know if Canberra or Pine Gap had been bombed."

"Sarah Tilford," she replied, and she held his gaze without offering her hand for him to shake. "Only the military bases at Darwin and Fremantle. And I didn't say they had been bombed."

"Sean Cameron," he replied. "Doesn't it strike you as odd that Pine Gap was untouched? It has a satellite Earth station of pivotal importance to ECHELON. As well as to the Aquacade program with eyes on Russia and China."

"Yes, we also think it's strange," she told him. "Look, I need to talk to my comrades," she told him. "That's if you don't mind."

"Not at all," Cameron replied.

She noticed then, Cameron's boyish smooth cheeks had reddened, and she relented.

"Do you two know any of this lot sitting across from us?" She asked Cameron and Storm.

"Only know Smiler and me," Liam replied with an awkward smile. "That's my fault. I sat them here."

"Smiler?" She repeated. She sighed and nodded the older man. "His real name is Ali."

"Ali Qassem," Smiler interjected.

The man's wide grin revealed a large gap where his two front teeth ought to have been.

"Call me Smiler. Everyone else does. Even Sarah."

Every so often Tilford let her eyes skated over Cameron's face. She knew better, but damn, the man intrigued her.

Cameron had noticed. He had caught her watching him through the ringlets of her brown hair. He knew those eyes could flash like amber gemstones, but now he turned to gaze back at her he saw they were a soft hazel.