Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (11 page)

Mac’s Nokia glowed bright orange in the pitch black of the room.

Reaching over he looked at the screen.
Scare Me
.

‘Hey, champ,’ he croaked into the old Service Nokia.

‘Mac,’ came Joe Imbruglia’s voice. ‘Sorry about the time but something’s come up.’

‘Yep?’ said Mac, reaching for his G-Shock on the bedside table. It was 1.58 am.

‘The Indons want an extension on the Handmaiden project. Seems it’s not yet completed.’

‘
What
?’ exclaimed Mac. ‘Fuck’s sakes, Joe!’

In the other bed, Chester mumbled to himself, out to it.

‘Not my fi rst choice either, mate,’ said Joe. ‘But there you have it.’

‘I thought Canberra wanted me in Kuta for the investigation?’

said Mac, trying for a whisper but too peeved to manage it.

Joe chuckled. ‘Well you did yourself out of that, didn’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Delegated it to those youngsters. Chester’s been hitting the bloody roof.’

Mac moved to the bathroom, shut the door quietly and sat on the closed toilet seat in the dark, his heart thumping in his temples. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘Chester called me, about eleven o’clock. Said you’d taken his best girl and then reassigned her to a joint public affairs effort with the AFP without consulting him. He’s ropeable.’

‘Mate, I just put the best team in there. They still answer to me, unless you want me riding a keyboard all day.’

‘I told him yours was always meant to be an oversight role, that you were never going to actually write the cops’ press releases for them.’

‘Am I in the shit?’

‘Nah,’ said Joe. ‘It’s just Chester going off. I mean, you ever heard him swear?’

‘No. Why?’

‘I asked him if he’d taken his complaints up with you yet, and he said, “No, Joe.” And when I asked him why not, he said, “Because he’s lying on his back snoring like a fucking bear!”’

Mac laughed weakly and rubbed his face, trying to wake up. His brain buzzed with fatigue. ‘Okay, mate, so Handmaiden, what’s the drum?’

‘Same secondment to the Indons, through BAIS. Same op.’

Mac felt the UN dream receding. ‘New York’s not going to happen, is it, Joe? I mean, Handmaiden is one of those things that could drag on for years.’

‘So get out there, mate, do your thing,’ said Joe, sounding genuinely conciliatory. ‘If anyone can bring in that little Akbar weasel, it’s you.’

Mac sulked in the back seat of the black LandCruiser, mulling over his career as they sped for the military air base behind Bali International.

Freddi and his driver, Purni, were silent in front and were probably knackered too.

Mac felt like writing a memo to someone saying it wasn’t fair, that he’d already planned Operation Handmaiden and successfully executed the fi rst and most diffi cult stage: acquiring Ahmed al Akbar without signs of a struggle and exfi ltrating him covertly. That was the Australian end, a daring and dangerous snatch that had been carried out almost perfectly by Team 4 and ASIS. It wasn’t right that the Indons had lost the bloke and were now calling him back to fi nd him again. Mac would love to see how Maddo and his boys at Team 4 would react if they were copied in on this latest development. Mac was also annoyed with himself that he hadn’t followed up on the face he’d seen in the pantry when he was doing the snatch. It now looked as though the person had been Samir. And if Samir was working with Hassan, it would explain why Akbar had been sprung so fast.

Freddi turned in his seat. ‘Okay for food, McQueen? Water?’

Mac shrugged, petulant. Couldn’t help it.

‘If I was you, McQueen, I’d be annoyed too.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Mac.

‘Yeah. I’d be thinking that I went out, caught that little bomber, now the army gone and lost him.’ Freddi shook his head, like it was the most serious thing in the world.

‘Freddi, I’m here so I’m already enlisted, okay?’ said Mac, annoyed.

‘You can stop with the charm offensive.’

Freddi turned back to the windscreen. ‘Breakfast at the base, then we’ll move. Gonna be a long day, okay?’

Mac rubbed his hands down the legs of his overalls, turning it into a stretch. ‘Sure, Freddi - let’s roll.’

They pulled in behind the commercial airport buildings six minutes later, drove down a cleared driveway lined with weeds, and slowed for the base police checkpoint. Purni snapped something at Freddi while looking in his side mirror and they stopped thirty metres short of the pillbox.

‘Your boyfriend’s here,’ said Freddi, leaning down to look at his own side mirror, his hand reaching for the black SIG Sauer on his right hip.

Ari walked along the passenger side of the LandCruiser, hands up, keeping a good distance from Freddi’s door. The Russian lifted his trop shirt to show a bare belly and no holster-bag. Smart guy, thought Mac. Been in South-East Asia long enough to learn some manners.

Freddi released his gun and smiled out of his open window. ‘Ari!

What can I do for you?’

‘I am needing to speak with McQueen, please,’ he said, pointing at Mac’s door.

Freddi turned to Mac. ‘Want to speak? Don’t have to.’

Mac lifted the door latch and joined Ari. They shook and the Russian moved further from the Cruiser.

‘You ever sleep, Ari?’ asked Mac.

‘Only when I am with woman,’ Ari chuckled. ‘Timing no good.’

‘Heard anything on Hassan?’

Ari did the Russian shrug, a less dramatic version than the Javanese but more dismissive. ‘I am leaving tonight, but I feel we must stay

- how you say it - in the touch.’

‘I told you, Ari, I’ve never been on Hassan - not my end.’

‘Yes, but still you were with Atomic Energy Agency when this Khan was stopped, yes?’ said Ari. ‘And the Indonesians are using you, so this is now Samir as well, yes?’

Mac gave him the look and raised his eyebrow.

‘Okay, okay,’ said Ari, knowing he was pushing the friendship too far. ‘But too many of the secrets when we are working for same thing?

Not so good, yes?’

‘Where are you headed, Ari?’

The Russian shrugged.

‘Come on, mate, too many secrets,
yes
?’

Ari put his hands on his hips, looked over Mac’s shoulder, nodded slightly, and then looked back. ‘Okay. Sumatra.’

‘Not Java?’

‘No, McQueen. Sumatra.’

‘Where in Sumatra? It’s a big place.’

‘I can’t say this, you know that.’

‘Heard anything more about your colleague?’ asked Mac, thinking Ari looked a little washed out.

‘No - he is dead or he is being, umm,
held
,’ said Ari, slumping a little. In the spy game it was unusual for anyone to use the word
torture
, in the same way soldiers didn’t like directly referring to death, but Mac saw the stress in the Russian’s eyes and knew what he was saying.

Deciding if he relinquished some information it might bring some other revelations back his way, Mac said, ‘Okay, Ari. We had eyes on Samir, yesterday.’

Ari nodded.

‘It was me - I saw him,’ said Mac.

‘You were there?’ said Ari, tensing. ‘On this JI ship?’

‘Yeah, mate. Thing is, Ahmed al Akbar was with him.’

Ari went completely still for a couple of seconds, looked Mac in the eye. ‘These people are al-Qaeda, yes? And you are letting these fuckers go?’

‘Mate, I’ve said too much. Your turn.’

As Ari tried to fi nd the right words and correct level of illumination, Mac turned and saw Freddi tap his G-Shock.

‘I let him go now, Freddi -
Tuhan memberkati
,’ said Ari.

Freddi looked away. If you wished God’s blessings on a Javanese, it wasn’t good manners for him to reply with grumpiness.

‘I think we are looking for the same crew, yes?’ said Ari. ‘Hassan and Samir.’

Mac was getting irritated. ‘Hassan and Samir, yes. But Akbar?

Akbar is Osama’s bagman -‘

The words fell off the end of his sentence as Mac realised what he was saying.

‘You see,’ said Ari, ‘why Samir and Akbar are on same ship?’

Mac nodded, things becoming clearer.

‘It very expensive,’ said Ari, ‘for nuclear device.’

It was a clear night as the Indonesian Huey chugged north-west. The host military had a choice whether to tell their foreign intelligence partners where they were going, and the Indon navy had decided not to.

Mac, Freddi and Purni all tried to sleep in the throbbing racket of the Huey, a Vietnam-era helo now made under licence in Indonesia.

The reliability record of the air frame and the familiar thromp of the turbo-shaft were reassuring to Mac, but it was still the loudest and most uncomfortable way to get around, even with the doors shut fast and all the high-tech damping materials they were lined with. After twenty minutes aloft Mac gave up on sleeping and saw the telltale sign of the Madura Strait, crowded with humanity on both sides, narrowing down to the huge city.

At Surabaya Naval Base an operator in pale-blue overalls and an aviator helmet escorted them across the tarmac to a white LandCruiser Prado. They were then driven across the runway to a hangar on the other side of the air wing apron, all wincing as they shot into the glare of the internal fl oodies which illuminated an air force F28. Mac’s G-Shock said it was 3.37 am.

They walked to the stairs and Freddi excused himself to go to the gents, so Purni and Mac climbed into the plane and grabbed the seats that faced each other at the front. There was a faint whining sound and the smell of avgas and institutional air freshener. The decor looked like 1986 was never going to go away and Mac briefl y worried about all those incidents in the early 1980s when Garuda seemed to kill so many people in F28s. He told himself he’d fl own safely in F28s on Ansett Airlines, and that seemed to balance the paranoia.

‘So, Purn,’ said Mac, yawning. ‘Can we talk about a destination now?’

Purni gave him a blank look and shook his head. He was well-dressed, and Mac knew from Freddi that he’d been educated at Monash University in Melbourne. Wherever you went in the world, the spy agencies were crammed with educated middle-class men trapped between the ride of their lives and the drudgery of procedure; between the fl ash of adrenaline and The Rules.

Mac fi shed in his pack and turned off both of his mobiles. If he wasn’t allowed to know where he was going then no other bastard was going to fi nd out vicariously. Freddi bounced up the stairs and sat next to Purni so that the two BAIS boys were rear-facing while Mac looked forward.

Mac settled into his seat as a loud shaking sound rattled around the cabin. Then a couple of soldiers in red berets appeared at the cabin door and waited while someone thumped up the aluminium trolley stairs behind them. Another soldier appeared holding a chain in his hand. Turning, the soldier pulled on the chain and two men in black hoods and grey pyjamas jerked in behind him, the fi rst prisoner chained to the second. The soldier leading the prisoners started down the aircraft pulling the hooded men behind him. The second prisoner had blood splashed down the front of his pyjama legs. It looked fresh and Mac thought immediately of Ari’s colleague.

The other two soldiers moved towards where Mac’s party was seated, their distinctive triangle patches with the vertical red dagger indicating they were Kopassus, Indonesian Army Special Forces.

Kopassus was one of the most-mentioned government agencies in any Amnesty International fi le-search.

Freddi smiled and chatted to the soldiers, then gestured at Mac.

‘McQueen - this is Major Benni Sudarto. We’re on his fl ight this morning.’

Mac put out his hand. ‘Thanks for the ride, Major,’ he said, all smiles.

Surdarto hesitated briefl y and then shook Mac’s hand. ‘I know you?’ he asked in mechanical English. He had a face that looked like it had been put together out of brown Lego, rectangular slabs of fl esh and bone composed his cheekbones, jaw and forehead.

Mac shrugged, looked out the window at the hangar. Benni Sudarto hadn’t changed. He was still built like a brick shithouse, was still suspicious and ill-mannered like he’d been back in ‘99, in East Timor.

Sudarto barked an order down the plane then took a pew in the facing seats on the other side of the aisle. ‘I do, don’t I?’ said Sudarto, not giving up.

There was a certain kind of Indonesian man made of muscle and bone and nothing else, and Benni Sudarto was such a bloke. It looked like if you punched him you’d break your hand. His neck started under his ears and the rolled-up sleeves of his camo shirt revealed enormous arms.

Mac shrugged. ‘Nah, Major. Anglos, mate - we all look alike.’

Sudarto forced a laugh, then looked away.

Mac caught Freddi’s eye; the other man’s expression said,
Be
careful
. Mac was going to be very, very careful. When he’d last seen Benni Sudarto, the Indonesian was a captain in Group 4, the Kopassus plainclothes hit squad. Back then Mac was an elusive Aussie spy in East Timor, known to the Indonesians as Kakatua, the Indon name for Timor’s cockatoo. Sudarto had hunted and Mac had evaded.

Careful didn’t get close.

They took off seven minutes later. Soon after, the crew dimmed the cabin lights and Mac eased back his seat, fl icked on his overhead reading light, reached into his pack and pulled out the stapled printouts that Garvs had organised for him. It was a ‘brief’ fi le on Hassan Ali. The covering photo showed a handsome man with intelligent, smiling eyes. The caption said Hassan was twenty-fi ve when the photo was taken in 1986.

Mac fl ipped to the second sheet of paper: Hassan was born in 1960

in Islamabad, father a lawyer, mother from a local moneyed family.

Educated in Islamabad, he’d done his master’s at the London School of Economics before returning home to Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI. Hassan had started at the political rather than military level and had postings in Washington, New Delhi, Canberra and Paris.

He’d made his name in scientifi c espionage and covert procurement.

Then, after a secondment to KRL - A.Q. Khan’s nuclear laboratory - in 1997, the fi le noted that he’d fallen off the offi cial spy map.