Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (12 page)

After ‘97 Hassan was suspected of being a full-time covert operative for KRL. A note added to the bottom of the bio mentioned that the Israeli government had been building a case for the Americans to stop protecting Pakistan and Khan because Hassan Ali had been forging friendships with terror outfi ts, including those linked with Libya and Iran.

Putting the fi le back in his pack, Mac tried to put the nuke puzzle together in a way that relied on facts rather than speculation. The nuclear connections Ari had been insisting on weren’t concrete enough for Mac to accept lightly.

In the late 1990s, Mac had spent two months in the UN’s Iraq Nuclear Verifi cation Offi ce. INVO was supposed to verify a nuclear program in Iraq but it was really a bunch of MI6 and CIA true-believers bullying the nuclear engineers into verifying that old tractor parts were really part of a clandestine enrichment centrifuge. INVO

was a mess, but it had shown Mac how easily a situation could be distorted by intelligence offi cers.

Still, it had to be said that there was something compelling about Ari’s theories. The Israelis and Russians knew that Dr Khan was selling enriched uranium and centrifuge cascades; Hassan Ali was a Khan lieutenant and one of the blokes the Indian intelligence services wanted shut down. Also, Ari was putting Hassan, Akbar and Samir together in Bali on the eve of the Sari and Paddy’s bombings. Which connected a rogue nuclear program with JI and al-Qaeda.

Ari was right about one thing, thought Mac as he felt sleep coming on: a bunch of farm labourers in sarungs may have needed a general like Samir to plan a conventional bombing, but they wouldn’t need a nuclear weapons broker from Pakistan or an al-Qaeda bagman.

He wondered where they were now heading. Something told him it was right behind Ari.

Shouts woke Mac and as he came to he felt the F28 descending.

Outside, the fi rst light of dawn was poking through the smoky blue haze of Sumatra. Glancing to his left he saw Benni Sudarto laughing with the two other soldiers. They were looking down the aisle to where someone was crying out. Mac guessed one of the prisoners had woken from a drug-induced sleep to fi nd himself hooded, and was panicking about where he was.

Sudarto’s face darkened as he yelled something down the plane.

The crying immediately dropped to a whimper. Mac looked at Freddi, who whispered, ‘The major just say to the guy, “If I have to plug your mouth I’ll do it with a size-eleven lace-up.”’

Sudarto rattled off more Bahasa, which Freddi interpreted for Mac. ‘A free service from Indonesian Army.’

The Kopassus guys slapped their thighs and Mac caught Benni Sudarto’s eye. The major winked.

Looking out the window again, Mac reckoned they were landing in Pekanbaru, which was on the east coast of Sumatra and closer to Singapore and Malaysia than to Jakarta. The haze had suggested the east coast of Sumatra but it was the F-5E Tiger fi ghter jets with the forward-sweeping wings that sealed it; Pekanbaru was the only military base on Sumatra with Tiger jets.

Freddi gestured for Mac to remain seated as the Kopassus soldiers and their prisoners disembarked and made for a large blue van.

While the F28 was being refuelled, Purni and Mac watched Freddi remonstrate with Benni Sudarto on the tarmac. After a few minutes, Freddi peeled away and came back to the F28, talking excitedly into his phone. Running to the top of the stairs, he knocked on the pilot door and barked an order. A reply came back in Bahasa, but it was a universal,
Yeah, yeah
.

One of the fl ight crew pulled the cabin door shut, locked it in place and asked the three of them to fasten their seatbelts as he slipped back into the cockpit. Almost immediately the revs came up and they started moving forward.

‘So, Freddi, what’s up?’ asked Mac.

‘Police from Medan chased off a plane trying to land at an old Jap airfi eld, inland from Binjai up near the national park,’ said Freddi, eyes already mad for the chase. ‘A party of eight or nine were on the ground before the landing was aborted. Now they’re on the run - two vehicles, lots of fi repower.’

The F28’s rear engines screamed and it raced down the runway as Freddi got on the phone again. Medan suited Mac - it was where his friend, Johnny Hukapa, was based.

They fl ew for twenty-fi ve minutes, talking things through on the way. It looked as if the Hassan-Akbar team was travelling as a single unit. And although the Medan POLRI had lost them, they’d done the next best thing and stopped them leaving the country. For now, anyway, they were trapped in the wild west of Sumatra.

‘When you say
fi repower
, Freddi, what are we looking at?’ asked Mac.

‘Police reckon American assault rifl es, look like M16 A2s, maybe M4s. One offi cer thought there was a fi fty-cal in there somewhere, but it’s not confi rmed.’

‘Any licence plates?’

‘Yep - we’ve got all that.’

‘Positive IDs?’ asked Mac. ‘I mean, are we sure it’s them?’

‘Hundred per cent on Samir, eighty per cent on Akbar. No one recognised Hassan - they wouldn’t know who he was, but the police guys said it was a Pakistani crew.’

‘That obvious?’

Freddi smiled. ‘Around here it is. Besides, their military guy already has a nickname and it’s the same as the one we had for him in Kuta.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, they call him Gorilla. He walks like an ape, you remember the guy?’

Mac nodded as he remembered ducking down in Ari’s car outside the Puri. The last thing he’d seen was that helmet hair on a big wide man with a big wide gait.

‘We’re trying to get a name on him, but we think he’s Hassan’s tough guy. Former Pakistani special forces, something like that.’

Mac thought about it. ‘Any other airfi elds they might use? A Plan B?’

Freddi shook his head, smiled. ‘This is Sumatra, McQueen - we got old airfi elds like we got trees.’

A black LandCruiser was waiting at the airport when they landed and Purni took the wheel. They left Medan behind and swept inland at a hundred and fi fty K an hour, locals pulling off on to the shoulder of the narrow roads as the Cruiser approached.

Freddi sat in the front with a police radio and Mac sat in the rear, his Oakley pack beside him. He hoped there was a spare assault rifl e in the weapons bags stowed behind him. The thought of a shoot-out with Gorilla’s boys, armed only with the Heckler, was not comforting.

The terrain undulated through lots of green, the heat and the haze giving the country a haunted feel. The radio crackled constantly and Freddi spoke into it while looking at a plastic-covered map on his lap. Occasionally he’d make an entry in a small detective’s notebook, turning around sometimes to confi rm a landmark called from a helo team. Mac didn’t know how you’d fi nd a landmark in that country with its miles of green scrub, palm-oil plantations, market gardens and small farms, punctuated by stands of jungle that looked like they’d been allowed to remain around the creeks and rivers.

A Huey painted in army camo colours buzzed the Cruiser and Freddi looked up through the sunroof at the ID numbers, then yelled something into the radio. The excitement almost reached screaming levels from the radio speakers as Freddi tapped Purni on the left arm and pointed, then tapped him again, Mac’s adrenaline squirting as they screeched into a four-wheel hand-brake stop.

Purni brought the revs up again and gunned the Cruiser into a hard-right turn as they aimed into an impossibly narrow jungle track and fl ew into it like a train into a tunnel. In seconds the bright light of the open Sumatran country was replaced with a darker, dappled drive down a trail close enough for the trees to brush and bang the sides of the Cruiser. Mac reached for his seatbelt as he looked over Purni’s shoulder and saw the speedo nudge one-seventy, the spring-mounted aerials whiplashing around the vehicle.

They screamed through the tunnel of green at breakneck speed, Mac suddenly feeling very seasick. Without warning they were travelling uphill, Purni struggling to keep the Cruiser on the track as it bucked and whined against the rough ground, the overworked engine screaming every time all four wheels got airborne. As the terrain got even steeper Mac grabbed the handrail in the ceiling and heard himself say,
Oh shit
, as the Cruiser hit the crest of the blind rise at one sixty-fi ve and leapt into the air.

They sailed for four seconds and when they descended they had run out of track and the LandCruiser was about ten metres into the jungle. Mac yelled as they bounced, small trees falling like bowling pins and thumping the undercarriage of the vehicle as Purni kept his foot on the gas. Then - as they hit a stump large enough to upend most vehicles - they were dropping nose down into a small river.

Mac leaned back and prayed as the LandCruiser buried its grille into the shallow water at such a speed that water and mud rose over the vehicle like a wave. Purni kept the revs going as the Cruiser, barely losing momentum, lurched across the twenty-metre-wide creek, muddy water pouring across the bonnet. Grabbing onto the gentler slope of the opposite bank, Purni slowly got enough purchase to start bowling trees again. Mac put his feet up on the back of Freddi’s seat as the engine screamed in pain. They got their speed up again so that the
thumpa-thumpa
of the jungle under and above the vehicle quickly reached a drum-like rhythm. With one fi nal lurch they were out of the jungle and back onto the track, bouncing up and down like a ball.

Sweat poured off Mac’s forehead. He’d seen lots of bad driving in his life, mostly teenagers in Rockie who’d save every penny for their fi rst ute and then see whether the rear tyres or the clutch-plate would burn out fi rst if you took it to seven grand and dropped the clutch.

But Purni was a whole new league. He was sober, for starters.

Purni gunned the accelerator again and the souped V8 screamed into line and raised a cloud of dust as the Cruiser’s speedo climbed back into three digits. Freddi worked the radio and then looked back.

‘Almost there, McQueen. Need some vests.’

The incoming radio was a choir of adrenaline and screaming. Then they all heard the unmistakable
pop
of automatic weapons bursting out of the radio’s speaker. Mac swivelled around and pulled two blue Kevlar vests from the rear compartment, passed them forward, then grabbed one for himself, fastening it across his overalls. Freddi asked for weapons and Mac passed him two M4s and a pistol-grip pumpy that Freddi wanted.

They had a spare M4 and Mac grabbed it, glad for the fi repower.

Freddi took a fi nal call and told Purni to pull over. They found a small natural culvert and Purni reversed the Cruiser into it. They were gasping fast and shallow as Freddi and Mac kicked their doors to get them open against the undergrowth.

They stood at the front of the Cruiser and, as the big V8 dinked, Freddi gave them the drum. Two carloads of bad guys had broken through and were heading their way, all heavily armed. The Kopassus helo had a fi re in the tail-rotor and the other BAIS operators who’d been giving chase in their LandCruiser had had to stand off given the numerical disadvantage. Another helo was hours away so it was down to Freddi, Mac and Purni.

Purni and Mac stayed on the side of the track where the Cruiser was hidden while Freddi crossed to the other side, stealthing forward and listening, his dark combat fatigue pants blending in with his HiTecs and vest. He had an M4 rifl e on one arm and the matt-black pumpy on the other. Mac noticed he didn’t take his sunnies off as he established his hide in the bushes.

‘Three on one, okay? And don’t go past your three o’clock,’ said Freddi.

Meaning: all three weapons on each vehicle as it came through, and don’t shoot directly across the road.

Eight seconds later, the fi rst sounds of a vehicle rose over the birds and monkeys. There was a faint scream and a thud and the wailing sounds of a 4x4 being driven hard.

‘Let’s go to work,’ said Freddi.

Mac checked for safety and load for the third time since he’d got out of the Cruiser. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he got into his hide and took a standing marksman stance, shouldered the M4

and made a brief ranging scan of the road and his expected fi eld of fi re. He visualised the whole thing, saw the target, then the narrow reaction window and saw himself fi ring with total steadiness.

Purni took a kneeling marksman pose fi fteen metres further down the road.

The mechanical screams got louder and suddenly there was a white Ford pick-up truck powering towards them, doing at least one-thirty klicks. Mac aimed up and as the Ford came into his pre-set range he squeezed on the trigger, letting a blaze of full-auto go at the windscreen of the F350 crew cab.

The Ford’s windscreen fell apart as the air fi lled with lead from both sides of the road. A shooter leaning over the Ford’s crew cab fi red at Freddi. As the truck passed Mac, he saw shooters in the well side, one over the cab and the other leaning on the rear rollbar. Mac ducked back into the culvert as the rear shooter let loose, shots fi ring through the trees above him. But the damage was done and the F350 was sliding off the track like a train derailing. There was a loud crash and the sound of rending steel and breaking trees as the Ford - obviously with a dead-man’s foot - kept the revs up deep into the jungle.

Mac got up and checked Purni and Freddi. They were both okay.

Freddi held his hand up to say
no
to chasing the shot-up Ford. Mac’s heart pounded in his temples as the sound of another vehicle got louder and they settled back in their hides. It came into view and they let their rifl es drop as they saw the other BAIS LandCruiser.

Freddi stood, put a hand up, and the black Cruiser locked up and slid for sixty metres.

‘We’re missing one truck,’ said Freddi.

Mac and Purni joined him in the middle of the track, checking their rifl es and peering ahead to see if there was another vehicle coming. The Cruiser’s white reversing lights came on and whoever was driving it gave it full revs as it backed up to the three of them and slid to a halt. Freddi jogged to the front passenger door and had a hurried conference with his colleague. Freddi pointed, held up one fi nger, pointed back in the opposite direction, pointed at the ground and shook his head. It seemed he wanted the other LandCruiser to wait until Freddi’s crew had dealt with the fi rst Ford and then both of them could go after the missing truck.