Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (3 page)

There were more thumps and the sounds of excited chatter coming closer. The diesels dropped revs, meaning
Penang Princess
‘s prop was being engaged, and Mac moved away from the combat divers to get a better line of sight.

As the chattering voices came lower through the ship, Mac glanced back and saw Pharaoh go for another squeeze, his face puffi ng up with exertion and the handles of the bolt-cutters fl exing slightly as his muscles strained through his wetsuit. He was built like a professional wrestler, but the shank held.

Human sounds echoed down the iron stairs, now just fi ve metres above. Mac gulped, sweat dripping down his face, praying that whatever checks were being made on Akbar, the sailors would only come down one of the companionways. He didn’t want to die like a rat in a basement.

Aiming up, he watched a pair of plastic-sandalled feet pause on the top of the companionway stairs - more talking, friendly, expressing relief that the navy didn’t want to board. Mac’s heart thumped in his head and he concentrated on what he could control: his breathing and his aim. Glancing over his shoulder again, he saw Pharaoh’s face turning purple as he puffed like a weightlifter, spittle fl ying off his white lips, arms rippling like there were champagne bottles moving beneath his wetsuit.

Finally a tinkling sound rang out as Pharaoh almost collapsed over the bolt-cutters. He’d done it.

Mac back-pedalled to his navy escort, keeping his eyes on the feet at the head of the companionway. Pharaoh caught his breath while Maddo twisted and removed the padlock from the handle. Then the combat diver pulled a small plastic bag from his webbing and removed a wet rag that quickly fi lled the enclosed space with a smell of solvent.

As Maddo pulled open the pantry door, Mac and Pharaoh aimed their guns into the dark. Inside, a well-dressed middle-aged Arabic man lay on a bench at hip-height, looking at them with an expression that fl ickered from relief to fear. Maddo moved straight at Akbar, grabbed him by the collar, pulled him back into his stomach and forced the rag over his mouth and nose, the bloke’s little hands scrabbling at the Australian’s arms until the solvent kicked in. They were lucky Akbar hadn’t made a sound.

Mac pulled the foil out of his webbing, handed it to Pharaoh and moved towards the companionway and those sandalled feet.

As Pharaoh busted the Xanax caps and poured them into Akbar’s mouth, Mac stealthed beneath the companionway stairs and waited for the feet to move, his lungs and heart going crazy, sweat pouring off his face. The feet shifted and the other person moved away as the feet started coming down the stairs, revealing a mid-twenties Indon sailor in sarung and white singlet. As the bloke hit the passageway and turned down to check on Akbar, Mac brought the Heckler up and shot him behind the ear. It was a very quiet weapon and the sound of the bloke dropping to the old black nylon carpet was greater than the mechanical thump of the round detonating. Mac pulled the body back behind the stairs, the bloke’s ankles still warm in his hands. This was the part of his job he didn’t like.

He turned to Maddo and Pharaoh, who were moving towards the companionway at the opposite end of the hall. Akbar lay limp over Pharaoh’s shoulder and the big diver had to duck to get both of them under some of the pipes that hung from the ceiling. As Mac moved over to shut the pantry door, his eyes briefl y caught something. He checked again, thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him.

They burst into the sunlight, panting with the heat and adrenaline.

Pharaoh was fi rst over the side of
Penang Princess,
one hand on the railing, the other holding Akbar tight against his chest. Maddo joined him and, leaning over the railing, wrapped the climb-rope around Akbar’s ankles, fl ipped him over and lowered him towards Smithee’s outspread arms. Smithee wound off the ankles and, as the rope swung free, Maddo, Mac and then Pharaoh came down the rope in silence.

Mac could sense the tension as Smithee pulled the mask over Akbar’s face, the banker coming up from the solvent and immediately trying to struggle. The mask was joined to a standard SCUBA set since you couldn’t put a drugged-up, inexperienced man in a rebreather, unless you wanted him panicking so bad you had to surface. Mac sized up the bloke’s anxiety, which was greater than the fear of simply being snatched. Maybe the bloke wasn’t a swimmer - many Arabs weren’t. Pulling the syringe of pure Valium out of his webbing, he got behind Akbar and jabbed him in the bum with the shortened needle, plunging the entire contents as fast as he could. Akbar yelped slightly, but after ten seconds he stopped struggling and after twenty he was as fl oppy as a doll.

Smithee strapped Akbar to Maddo’s seat and Maddo kitted up and lay on him. You needed an experienced diver to make sure the snatchee didn’t stop breathing. Pharaoh and Mac put on their rebreathers and gave Maddo the okay through the comms, all of them looking up at the railing, expecting a bunch of faces and a hedgerow of AK-47s to emerge at any minute.

The whine started and the sled slipped below the surface. Mac felt the warm waters envelop him and was happy for the cover, if not the entrapped feeling of the full face mask.

The sled got to fi ve metres submerged and they made for the RV.

Forcing his breathing into the long rhythms needed for the rebreathers, Mac went over the op in his mind. He didn’t like killing another person and usually he had to work hard to keep it from swamping his thoughts. But this time he was preoccupied with something else entirely - he had seen something in that pantry as he shut the door.

It was a pair of human eyes, staring out of a refi ned Indonesian face.

Mac didn’t like taking guesses at what he saw and heard, but he was eighty per cent certain he’d locked eyes with Jemaah Islamiyah general Abu Samir.

They RV’d with Sosa on a deserted beach two kilometres east of Aimere on the Flores south coast. An old-fashioned BAIS hard-head, Sosa was a short, thickly muscled Javanese, about forty. As Mac unharnessed Akbar from the SCUBA, Sosa waded into the water, soaking his tan chinos to the knee, and beckoned for Akbar to come to him. Still groggy, Akbar hesitated. But when Sosa pulled a black SIG Sauer handgun from beneath his white trop shirt, Akbar slipped over the side of the sled into the tropical water. Sosa grabbed him by the arm and walked him to where a taller Indon waited at the opened rear doors of a white Mercedes van.

Mac removed his rebreather and strapped it to his seat. The air was wall-to-wall screeching birds, clattering insects and hollering monkeys. Some of the remotest parts of Indonesia were louder than George Street on a Monday morning.

‘Thanks, boys,’ said Mac, turning.

Maddo shook his hand, told him to take it easy.

When Pharaoh put his paw out, Mac said, ‘Nice work on the padlock, mate.’

‘Sweet as,’ Pharaoh said, winking.

‘Cheers, Macca,’ Smithee called as he started the outboard. The sled, which had been pumped dry and was an infl atable boat again, turned south and accelerated away across the swell in a blast of two-stroke fumes and small frog-leaps. Mac smiled. Team 4 were a bunch of cowboys. Very dangerous cowboys.

Mac and Sosa sat in the front seats of the van as they drove west through the Flores countryside with farm vehicles, old Hino trucks and Honda motor scooters. To the left Mac caught glimpses of the sapphire Savu Sea and the green of Sumba Island, which rose out of the water like a croc waiting for prey. On either side of them were market gardens, candlenut orchards and forests. But mostly it was subsistence farms, grandparents with young children tending roadside fruit stalls with three or four items for sale.

Sosa’s offsider, Charles, sat in the back with Akbar, who was chained to the inside of the van, a blood pressure strap around his bicep and a drip in his forearm. Mac had changed into a black T-shirt and a pair of blue boardies and, letting the adrenaline come down, made small talk with Sosa about politics and the Chinese - the one nationality that united most nations in South-East Asia.

‘They change date for their Olympics,’ sneered Sosa, lighting a smoke. ‘Told stupid Anglo it all about weather pattern.’

A Hino truck came at them, trying to come down the Indonesian

‘third lane’, and Sosa pulled onto the dirt shoulder to let it through the middle.

‘Oh well, champ,’ said Mac, his heart rate now at normal, ‘maybe all those eights will be lucky for everyone in the region, huh?’

Sosa wasn’t buying it. The Chinese had held back the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics till the eighth of August - two weeks after the date designated in the IOC’s contract. The new start date of 8.8.08 gave the Chinese three ‘eights’, which augured most auspiciously in feng shui. Most Australians thought it was funny, but other nations in Asia hated that sort of Chinese arrogance.

Mac swigged from a big bottle of Vittel and felt a sharp pain in his sternum. He had planned two days of R&R on a small island off Flores and then it was back to Manila to do a handover to his replacement before joining the Land of the Long Lunch for the next twelve months.

Mac had been seconded to United Nations headquarters in New York, where he’d be liaising between New York and Canberra and paying close attention to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacifi c in Bangers. He’d been doing his briefi ngs with diplomats and ASIS operatives at the UN for the past two months, getting to know the people who were fl eecing the ESCAP aid programs, and those at CNTBTO who wanted to shut down Australia’s uranium exports. He had good form for CNTBTO because of former rotations.

In Mac’s world the UN was a joke for its wastage, corruption and its lack of action on the things it should act on. For spy organisations the UN was a famous point of intelligence leakage. It had become a global grease trap for malcontents and runners-up - politicians who couldn’t keep their pants on, majors who couldn’t become colonels, diplomats lost to the grog and technically excellent bureaucrats without the leadership credentials to take them to the top of a government department. People long on hubris and short on achievement who would vie for Top Dog status in every conversation by proving greater insider knowledge than the next guy. Those people were dangerous to the national interest, which was why the UN and its agencies were overrun with spies posing as UN hacks, listening in as big-noters showed off their knowledge of where the radar arrays were really hidden, which Saddam companies were still operating in California, and how much gold was being stockpiled by a country’s central bank long after the offi cial change to a fl oated currency.

Mac blocked his concerns about Akbar and Samir by focusing on the UN gig. It was what Mac had been trained for, what he had dreamed of when he joined ASIS from the University of Queensland with an honours degree in history. That is, high-level espionage where you got to wear a suit and not carry a sidearm. Instead, Mac had been earmarked for paramilitary training on entering ASIS and he was sent to the UK to undergo the Royal Marines Commando training at Devon and intel sections at Chicksands. He’d found it a little insulting at the time, since he had an excellent degree, but the suits in Canberra had taken one look at him and seen only a boy from Rockhampton with a footballer’s build.

Once in the Royal Marines he’d become competitive and was selected to do the Swimmer-Canoeist program with the Special Boat Service, culminating in a survival run in the jungles of Brunei - an event that had pushed Mac right to the edge, to the point where he thought he might be going mad.

And that had been that. After Mac’s intake, ASIS had switched tack and tried to train selected Aussie SAS soldiers for intel duties. Neither way was entirely successful because the soldier and the spy, in the end, were complementary yet disparate professions. They had to work together but they weren’t the same thing. Mac was now thirty-two and he’d spent the past decade either in the boonies of South-East Asia or in war zones like Timor, Iraq and Bosnia. There hadn’t been much in the way of canasta and beautiful girls in ball gowns. He hoped the UN and New York would change that.

They got to the airfi eld outside Reo in a shade under two hours. There was an Indonesian plainclothes aircrew waiting at a briefi ng table in the hangar and an old twin-engine Fokker Friendship waiting outside.

Sosa drove into the World War II-era hangar, sprang from the van and barked an order. The BAIS guys dragged Akbar from the van and Mac noticed there was a gurney with an IV pole beside the table. Akbar was walking - disoriented but walking - and they led him to the Fokker, which sat in the thirty-six-degree heat.

Sosa moved to a small offi ce area, unlocked the door, and retrieved Mac’s backpack. Then he waved towards the van. ‘Charles can take you where you want, or you can come with us, McQueen.’

Mac took the pack, jerked his thumb at the van. ‘Might stick with Charles. No offence - just like his aftershave.’

Sosa smirked, put out his hand. ‘Been a pleasure,
maate
.’

Indonesians could never quite get the Aussie drawl going on
mate
, but Mac appreciated the effort. Returning the shake, he started towards the van, then stopped. ‘Know something, Sosey?’ he asked, trying to keep it casual.

Sosa shrugged, sucked on his cigarette.

‘I can’t remember what happened to Samir. Abu Samir …’

‘Yeah, yeah, McQueen. I know who he is.’

‘He still in Malaysia?’ asked Mac.

Sosa gave a big Javanese shrug. ‘Why, what you got?’

Mac hadn’t wanted the conversation to go like this. ‘Nothing, mate. Just that we’re snatching Akbar and we’ve still got someone like Samir running around the shop, see what I mean?’

‘Samir’s the Malaysians’ problem - they’re all over him, what I know,’ said Sosa.

Mac nodded slow, slugged the last of the Vittel, threw the empty bottle at a rubbish bin. It hit the lip, bounced on the old concrete fl oor. Mac looked for wood to touch.

‘Like I said, McQueen - what you got?’

Mac shook his head. ‘Nothing, mate, just thought I overheard those sailors mentioning Samir.’