Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike (45 page)

‘Mate, I’ve been taken off it. It’s in the hands of the CT guys now.’

Ted understood - if you went to a border-protection footing you couldn’t have every Commonwealth employee trying to get involved.

‘I was thinking about that,’ mused Ted. ‘Aussies know what they’re doing, but I hope they’re putting some thinking into concealment strategies.’

‘What do you mean? asked Mac, sipping his tea.

‘Well, you know what the freighting systems are like into this country now, right?’

‘Sure,’ said Mac, knowing that they were pre-cleared and scanned and sniffed and inspected and otherwise seriously worked over.

Milinda, Jen’s FBI friend in Jakarta, had once told him that Australia had a better forward-protection barrier for incoming freight than even the United States.

‘So the way to bring a device in without it being detected would be as a concealment, maybe on your person, right?’

‘I suppose it’s portable. That what you saying?’ said Mac.

‘For sure. Those Israeli-South African devices were about fi fty kilograms and fi tted in a pack.’

‘Or maybe not a concealment.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Ted. ‘Could even be open about it, tell them that it’s actually something else. Remember, it’s a simple alloy cylinder, a ubiquitous shape.’

‘You’d need a distraction,’ said Mac.

‘A human distraction,’ said Ted.

With Ke still in front of the telly, and Rachel sleeping, Mac thought he’d have a quick search on the internet, follow a small snippet that Ted had mentioned. Ubiquitous alloy canisters and human distractions.

It might be worth a look.

Firing up the computer in the spare room, he searched under canisters, Australia, imports. He looked through all the industrial suppliers of waterproof, dust-proof, anti-magnetic and self-sealing canisters. Some were for cigars while others were moved in semi-trailers. After twenty minutes, it was a canister world and Mac closed the internet browser before he sent himself mad.

He looked over at Ke as he emerged from the spare room and wondered why Jenny had had to duck out. Ke wasn’t Thai, as Jenny had claimed over the phone; he was Cambodian and Mac had a strange fear that his wife was poking around in places that could get her hurt.

Jenny would have misled him knowing that any connection between a homeless young boy and Cambodia would have someone like Mac thinking about the Khmer Rouge’s slavery business.

Emptying the dishwasher, Mac thought about the other point Ted had made, about the human distraction. As young recruits, spies were taught how to create distractions - or, at least, how to dilute themselves out of a person’s vision or thinking. And the best way to do that was by numbers: have a wife, travel with an assistant, blend in with a team, move with the crowd, attend a conference, move with a celebrity …

Putting the last of the cutlery in the drawer, Mac walked back into the spare room, sat at the computer screen and opened the internet browser again. If it was too hard to bring a mini-nuke in by air or sea, could it be done by walking a ubiquitous canister through Customs with a human distraction? A sports team? Someone well-known?

The search under ‘sports team December 2008’ wasn’t encouraging. Swim teams from California, a schoolboy cricket squad from Bangladesh. No chance of camoufl age there. He tried a search under ‘conferences December 2008’, but it was a fl ood of junk, mostly sites advertising logistics and catering and venues.

About to shut the browser down again, Mac tried one more thing and put ‘international’ in front of the conference search and made it an Australian search.

The third entry was headlined as
Darwin 2008 - Water and Rights: New
approaches to public water supply
. Darwin, Australia’s gateway to Asia and the fi rst place in Australia Freddi Gardjito had thought of when they were surmising where a long-range King Air 200 could get to from northern Sumatra. Clicking on the search link, Mac was taken into the Asia Development Bank website; the Asian Development Fund division of the organisation was running the water conference.

He scrolled down through the site, reading it as a future controller of an economic team might, looking for matters of interest, names that made a pattern, companies that broke a pattern. It was all water, power, hospitals, swamp drainage, roads. He ran his eyes down the line-up and saw that Darwin’s conference was starting tomorrow, a one-dayer.

He felt his breath quickening. The keynote speaker was a Canadian engineering academic named Dr Hamish Gough, whom Mac had read about in
Time
and the
East Asia Economic Review
. A lecturer at the University of Malaya, Gough was well-known in Asia for his brilliant and practical public infrastructure solutions and he was the subject of a breakout box in the conference program.

Mac read the caption: apparently Dr Gough had designed and manufactured reverse-osmosis scrubbing canisters that created potable water from sea water. The break-through with his design was that the membranes in his canisters worked under natural water pressure so a village could store sea water in a tank and drop it into a canister which would slowly turn the sea water to drinking water and would do so without the massive power usage associated with typical desalination plants. The story said Gough had developed hand-winched tanks that dropped down slipways into the sea; when they were fi lled with sea water, they were then winched up to a stand and hooked up to the hoses that fell straight into the canisters. If you wanted more potable water and faster, you just used more canisters, more hoses. Now Dr Gough wanted the world’s corporations to contribute to a fund that would manufacture these things and give them away to rural villages in the developing world. He didn’t want to make a profi t, he said, but multinationals had to accept that if their enormous water consumption took the precious resource from subsistence villagers -

which was still one-half of the world’s population - then they should furnish them with a way of getting potable water from the sea and other brackish water supplies.

But the part of the story Mac fi xed on was the photo. Dr Hamish Gough was pictured standing beside a green-grey alloy cylinder which stood upright on a table beside him. It was about twenty inches tall and fi ve inches across. It was one of those things that could pass for something else.

What had Ted said?
Tell them that it’s actually something else
.

Calling directory assistance, Mac asked to be put through to the Skycity casino and hotel in Darwin. Reception answered and Mac asked for Dr Gough.

The call went through to a room and a small singsong voice answered on six. ‘Hello?’

‘Dr Gough, Richard Davis here, from the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra. Welcome to Australia. It’s a pleasure to have you, sir.’

‘Well, thank you, Mr Davis,’ said Dr Gough. ‘Perhaps you could help me?’

‘Certainly, sir, what can I help you with?’

‘My water purifi er. I brought it to the hotel this morning from the airport and now it’s gone.’

‘You’ve told the hotel?’ asked Mac, alert.

‘Oh yes, and the police are here too,’ replied the Canadian.

‘What happened?’ asked Mac, pretty sure he knew the whole scenario.

‘The Development Fund person came to my room and said he was setting up the conference for my speech, and wanted to pick up the canister. When I got down to the conference centre half an hour ago, the canister was not there,’ said Dr Gough, exasperated. ‘I only brought one from Kuala Lumpur - now what am I going to show the delegates?’

Mac breathed out, rubbed his temples and asked a question he already knew the answer to. ‘The Asia Development Fund guy, why did you trust him?’

‘He was assigned to me in Kuala Lumpur,’ said Dr Gough, annoyed.

‘He even packed the water purifi er. He was a nice young Indian fellow, very helpful.’

‘What was the purifi er packed in, sir?’ asked Mac.

‘Oh, it’s a big plastic carry case. Like a really big power-drill case, and it’s green.’

As Mac rang off he was ninety-nine per cent sure that Australia’s fi rst nuclear terror incident had started with a mini-nuke coming through Darwin Customs as a water purifi er.

As soon as Scotty answered the phone in Canberra, Mac asked him to get Tobin.

‘What’s it about, Macca? Tobin’s in a meeting.’

‘I think the device is already here,’ said Mac.

‘Shit,’ said Scotty. ‘I’ll see if I can get him out, but it may be beyond him now.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘We took it up to the PM’s offi ce, sold it, and they gave it to the AFP. They’re coordinating. We’re not starters.’

‘Fuck!’ said Mac. ‘Can I talk with Tobin for thirty seconds? Swear to God, Scotty.’

Mac’s brain raced with the possibilities as the line went into muzak limbo: Hassan, Lempo and Gorilla, loose with a mini-nuke, in Australia. Three men, one bomb and an entire continent to hide in until they handed over to Mantiqi Four.

‘McQueen?’ whispered Greg Tobin, and Mac guessed he was still in the meeting.

‘Greg, I need a tasking in Darwin.’

‘Economic?’

‘Yep. Water technologies.’

‘Can’t this wait?’ snapped Tobin.

‘It’s starting this arvo.’

‘Okay. Do it.’

‘Another thing, Greg.’

‘Thirty seconds, mate.’

‘I need the Falcon.’

There was a pause as Mac heard Tobin tell the meeting that he’d have to take this in his offi ce, but he’d be back in one minute.

Tobin started talking before his mouth was anywhere near his offi ce phone. ‘The Falcon? Fuck’s sake, McQueen - come clean right now or the answer to everything is no.’

‘Greg, I don’t take corporate jet rides for fun, okay?’

‘There’re no fl ights to Darwin? Qantas hasn’t discovered this place yet?’

‘I think the device we discussed came into Darwin this morning on a fl ight out of KL, for the conference on water.’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, McQueen?’ gasped Tobin.

‘It came through in a case that would normally hold a desalination canister, a portable water purifi er. It went missing this morning from the hotel.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just got off the phone with the engineer who brought it in. He was used as a mule. They switched his water purifi er for the mini-nuke. They’d be about the same size and weight.’

‘You just got off the phone?! Shit, McQueen, the AFP is running a code-red border-protection program and you’re sneaking around with a private investigation?’

‘Fuck’s sake, mate,’ barked Mac, pissed off that the corporate niceties were getting in the way at such a critical time. ‘I can’t manage the Federal Police from here. Even if Morris would take my calls, which he wouldn’t, can you imagine the Feds or Customs chasing up every idea I have?’

‘No - they’d tell you to get rooted, and that’s what I’m doing too, right this second,’ said Tobin.

‘I’ll also need a ready-reaction team,’ said Mac, trying to keep his temper down. ‘Four RAR Commandos are a good bunch, worked with them in Timor.’

Tobin made a sound that could have been dark laughter or crying.

‘Shit, mate, you want to take the cavalry with you? You are too much, you know that?’

‘Look, it’s not going to tread on any AFP toes because I’m economic, right? I’m also Schedule Two. I have the right to carry and use fi rearms.’

‘I don’t think
fi rearm
means a bunch of special forces guys.’

‘Well, you know, Greg, after the shootings in Jakarta we’re just taking precautions. It’s an OH and S issue, right? Your human resource is your most important asset, world’s best practice.’

Tobin sighed. ‘For someone who hates offi ce guys, you sure know how to think like one.’

As the Hawker Falcon sped over the outback, Mac briefed Jason Robertson on the new tasking they were heading towards, called Limelight. Robbo and the three other soldiers onboard were from 4RAR Commando, the Australian special forces unit that comprised the Tactical Assault Group (East), based out of Holsworthy barracks in outer Sydney. Their speciality was jungle warfare, demolitions and CBRNE - Chemical, Biological, Radioactive, Nuclear and enhanced Explosives. Mac had worked with the commandos in East Timor in an operation that had made his name in the intelligence community.

It had been a long, dangerous series of engagements with a ruthless enemy and Mac had drawn close to the boys. Robbo was a veteran of that confl ict. A private during the East Timor campaigns, he was now commanding the troop.

‘So, Macca,’ said Robbo, eyeballing him. ‘That’s all we have?’

Mac nodded. He’d briefed Robbo as far as he could, but it wasn’t much. ‘We’ll start in Darwin, mate, pick up the trail, take it from there.’

Robbo was silent. Soldiers developed a sixth sense for people who didn’t entirely know what they were doing, and Mac was getting that look now. ‘Okay, Macca, your call.’

Mac pulled several fi les from his backpack and handed them over.

‘Get the boys looking at those. That’s Hassan, Lempo and Shareef - a bloke they call Gorilla,’ said Mac. ‘This is who we’re dealing with. They’re very organised, very pro and they have a mini-nuclear device.’

Robbo took the fi les and eyed Mac again, with eyes an even paler blue than Mac’s. He was about six-foot, blond hair in an army cut and strongly built in the arms, legs and back. Mac had seen him in combat and seen him in a fi st fi ght, and he was glad he was on Robbo’s side in both.

‘There’s only three?’ asked Robbo.

‘That’s the core, but there’s a local JI cell out there too. Mantiqi Four.’

‘The Pakistanis - are they tooled up?’ Robbo asked, passing the fi les to the three other Commandos.

‘They came in on a commercial fl ight, but I’d assume they know how to arm themselves.’

‘How much head start are we giving them?’

Mac looked at his G-Shock. It was 1.43 pm. ‘Better part of fi ve hours.’

Robbo gazed at the outback. ‘It’s a big place, Macca,’ he said, nodding at the scenery of red dirt and spinifex. ‘We might be better served thinking where they’re heading.’

‘Agreed. The AFP have got the state and territory cops searching road and rail traffi c and there’s a wide alert out for these guys at the airports.’