GAURAV SHARMA
TODAY is Saturday, August 20, the 232nd day of 2022. There are 133 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1619 — The first Africans arrive in the United States, brought in by the Dutch, who sell them as indentured servants at Jamestown Colony in Virginia, the beginning of American slavery.
1882 — Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture is first performed, in Moscow, in a tent.
1904 — New Zealand’s popular weekly pictorial newspaper New Zealand Free Lance prints a J C Blomfield cartoon of a plucky kiwi morphed into a moa to depict the All Blacks’ 93 victory over Great Britain in the first rugby test between the two teams. This is believed to have been the first use of a kiwi to symbolise New Zealand in a cartoon.
1919 — Lord Jellicoe arrives in Wellington in command of HMS New Zealand. His report on New Zealand’s defences leads to the formation of the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy.
1921 — While on the ship Eastern Planet, Ralph Lawrence uses a radio telephone to broadcast music for the benefit of the radio operator on Wairuna .Itis also heard on land in Christchurch and marks one of the first radio broadcasts in New Zealand.
1940 — The New Zealand Shipping Company freighter SS Turakina is sunk by the German raider
Orion 500km off the Taranaki coast after a brief gun battle, the first in the Tasman Sea.
1946 — Two engine crew drown when a goods train is derailed by a slip and plunges into the Manawatu River.
1962 — Risking life and limb, Invercargill’s Burt Munro (63) is clocked at 288kmh on his 1920 Indian motorcycle at the National Speed Trials at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, setting a world record.
1977 — The United States Voyager II spacecraft is launched on its mission to explore the outer planets. It carries into space a copper phonograph recording of greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature, plus a map showing Earth’s location.
1980 — Italian Reinhold Messner makes the first successful solo ascent of Mt Everest.
2003 — Libya begins transferring $US2.7 billion to the Bank for International Settlements to compensate families of the victims of the 1988 airliner bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.
2012 — Novopay, the payroll system for the New Zealand education sector, is launched after a tender for the system was issued to Talent2 in 2007. Ongoing excessive errors lead to the Government taking over the running of the system after two years.
2015 — A report in the Otago Daily Times draws attention to the dwindling numbers of groynes at St Clair Beach. The original timber piles were set in place in 1902 to manage sand drift. Over recent months the much photographed feature of the beach has seen numbers drop from 35 to 22.
MONDAY
Dr Gaurav Sharma walked through the mean streets at his accustomed hour of 3.15am. His hands were plunged deep into the pockets of his trench coat, and he had pulled the collar up around his ears. It was cold. But he was hot on the trail of a vast conspiracy to defraud the New Zealand public.
‘‘I am running,’’ he thought, ‘‘hot and cold.’’
He turned from Willis St on to Lambton Quay. He came to the first shop window and breathed on the glass. Nothing. And then the next shop window, and the one after that. Nothing. He corrected himself: ‘‘Nothing yet.’’
Somewhere along Lambton Quay a secret message would be revealed on one of the shop windows. The message would lift the lid on the Government’s regime of disinformation and hidden agendas. ‘‘And much else,’’ said his source, who was on the inside.
TUESDAY
One by one the Government MPs entered Bowen House in downtown Wellington and keyed in the access number that opened the green door made of strengthened metal that led to an underground tunnel which came to the Civil Defence bunker built beneath the Beehive.
And one by one, they came to a door marked, DEFENCE FORCE RESTRICTED PLACE. IT IS AN OFFENCE PUNISHABLE BY IMPRISONMENT TO PROCEED BEYOND THIS NOTICE.
They knocked three times, paused and knocked two times. An SIS operative opened the door and showed them into the nerve centre of the bunker. There were pods of desks, huge screens, no shortage of staple removers. Looking over it was the bridge, and sitting in the bridge command throne was Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
‘‘We have a situation with Sharma,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s time to enter Mode Four.’’
WEDNESDAY
Dr Sharma breathed on the glass. It revealed a message written by finger: ‘‘Mode Four’’.
‘‘Oh my God,’’ he said out loud. ‘‘It’s come to this.’’
He felt a hand on his shoulder. His last thought was: McAnulty. The syringe entered his neck, and he fell into a deep unconsciousness, which actually resembled his waking consciousness. He was a strange fellow.
THURSDAY
One by one the Government MPs entered Bowen House and did all the usual things with the tunnel and the green door and the RESTRICTED PLACE door, but this time when they entered, they fell through a trapdoor into a net, that gently tipped them into a boat which set off on an underground water channel emerging on Wellington harbour, and then journeyed to Somes Island.
They were taken to the remains of the former World War 2 internment camp where the Prime Minister paced the room, and eyed them carefully.
One of her MPs, she knew, was acting as Sharma’s source. But who? Which one? She would find out.
FRIDAY
Dr Sharma ran down Lambton Quay, and grabbed at the lapels of passersby.
‘‘She’s a liar!,’’ he screamed.
‘‘She’s lying! The prime minister! So many lies! Lies, lies, lies! All of it, lies! Yes, Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, is a liar! Hear me before it’s too late! Listen! Listen to what I am saying to you!’’
But they pushed him away, and kept on walking. They did not wish to have anything to do with him. It wasn’t what he was saying. It was the fact he was naked.
His source watched from a hotel window above Lambton Quay. ‘‘I should have written, ‘Behind you’,’’ the source said out loud.
There was a knock at the door.
‘‘Room service,’’ a voice called out.
‘‘I didn’t order room service,’’ the source replied.