Sensitive New Age Spy (26 page)

This scenario would explain all those trips she took to Perth whenever she had a break. She always said she was going surfing at Margaret River, but she’d often come back with bruises and sprains. Once she’d even shown up with a broken collarbone, saying she’d got hammered on a righthander at North Point.

The SAS trained out of Swan Barracks in Perth, and since I hadn’t been smart enough to join the dots on that one, I wondered what the hell I’d been doing running an
intelligence service.

‘Exactly how long has this being going on?’ I asked.

She smiled. ‘A year or three. A girl’s got to have a hobby.’

‘Well, your timing, as always, is impeccable, Ms Danko.’

‘I got alarmed yesterday afternoon when Ed’s floating gin palace disappeared off American satellite surveillance. Then when Artemesia’s radar went down and your homing beacon cut in and out, I figured it was time to call in the heavy mob. But it was your happy snap of Pergo and the missile that clinched the deal. I forwarded it to Lonergan, who took it straight to the Defence Minister.’

‘That must have been an interesting meeting.’

‘I’d say so. Suddenly everyone was white and shaking and in full
get it sorted and let’s pretend it never happened
mode. Next thing, Gwenda received an order authorising me to do whatever was necessary. She wasn’t all that happy about it, though. I won’t be hanging out for a Christmas bonus this year. Getting the ground-assault teams ashore held us up a little, but we got here in the end.’

‘Who’s we?’ I said.

‘Well, there’s the SAS, as you can see. We choppered in out of Hobart. And Lonergan organised for the
Altoona
to make a high-speed run down from Sydney with commandos from 4 RAR. They came ashore by rubber boat for the land assault, and the
Altoona’s
been standing off just over the horizon, watching the radar for anything in the way of a rocket launching, with her anti-missile missiles armed
and ready, just in case.’

‘SAS
and
commandos? You weren’t taking any chances.’

‘With Pergo and the choirboys here, I figured we’d need all the firepower we could muster.’

‘You got that right.’

A figure jogged up dressed in US Marine combat fatigues and carrying an M4 carbine.

‘Very glad to see you and the cavalry, Carter.’

‘You too, Alby. You okay? All in one piece?’

‘Yeah, thanks, mate. Rounded up your choirboys?’

‘Yep. Every one of them. And let me tell you, they’re singing like canaries.’

The US Navy would get the surviving members of the choir on charges of mutiny, murder and desertion. Once convicted in a closed court, I figured they’d be stuck in the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth until the next millennium or beyond.

There was a loud bang from the direction of the staff quarters and I looked around.

‘Just our boys tidying up the loose ends,’ Julie said.

A trooper broke away from the group of prisoners near the workshop and raced over to us. He spoke quietly to the bloke who’d been giving the orders, who glanced over at Julie and said,
‘We
can’t account for Target One.’

‘Artemesia?’ I asked.

Julie nodded.

‘And you’ve got all the chopper pilots?’

‘In their quarters, secured,’ the SAS commander said.

‘Where the hell is she?’ Julie said, and then there was another loud bang from the direction of the launch ramp, followed by the rumbling roar of a booster rocket firing up. We all turned in the direction of the ramp.

‘Looks like someone left the keys in the ignition,’ Ed said, and suddenly, with a deafening roar and billows of white smoke, Artemesia Gaarg’s lesson to the world’s whaling nations was blasting its way up the ramp and into the clear blue Tasmanian sky.

The solid-fuel booster rocket burned out around three hundred metres into the air and fell away from the missile. There was a brief spluttering sound from the missile’s engine, then a loud metallic bang, then silence. The momentum provided by the booster rocket kept the missile going forward and upward for another fifteen seconds or so, then it slowed, the nose dipped, and it began a slow descent towards the water.

It looked like Sheehan had pulled a bang-and-burn sabotage mission on his own cruise missile without Pergo noticing, and if he had I’d be willing to swallow my pride and make the man the best Spamburger he’d had in his life. Of course, how long that life was going to be was currently up for discussion.

I considered putting my fingers in my ears to block out the noise of the nuke going off when it hit the water, but decided it was probably pointless. Even the tough SAS men were staring wide-eyed at the falling missile. The only person who
wasn’t holding her breath was Clare. She either had nerves of steel or she knew something I didn’t. I was really hoping it was the latter.

The missile was heading straight down now and it hit the water with all the grace of a high diver. There was one small splash of white water and then it was gone.

No one moved for a full sixty seconds after the impact, and when we hadn’t been vapourised by that point it seemed safe to relax.

I looked at Clare.
‘No
bang?’ I said. ‘Not that I’m complaining.’

‘The warhead is fitted with a standard category-G permissive action link. You have to key in a twelve-digit code to arm it. But this one also has an AUD lock. If you hesitate for three seconds between the third, sixth and tenth digits, it reads it as Arming Under Duress. It finishes the procedure normally on the display but totally shuts down the detonation sequence. I let Pergo smack me around a bit for appearance’s sake, and then I tripped the AUD code.’

‘Any chance of the nuke breaking open and producing a generation of glow-in-the-dark whales?’ I asked.

‘Minimal. The casing is designed to withstand substantial impact. Plus there’s a homing device fitted, so we should be able to retrieve it pretty quickly with an unmanned submersible salvage vehicle.’

Now that the warhead was safe on the bottom of the ocean, that left Artemesia.

‘With the chopper pilots locked up, there’s only one way off this place,’ I said, looking down towards the jetty, where a white sail was already being hoisted on the old whaleboat.

Julie was on the move, heading towards the jetty and unhooking her MP5K as she ran. Two SAS troopers were sprinting towards the headland, leaving the fourth to guard Pergo.

By the time I caught up with Julie at the beach, Artemesia had the whaleboat under sail and well away from the jetty. We had no way of stopping her. Julie took off again, sprinting towards the headland. It was obvious Artemesia was going to make the open ocean without any trouble, but what did it matter? She really had nowhere to run to.

The craft cleared the harbour entrance, and just as I was about to yell to Julie to radio the marine police, its mast began rocking violently from side to side. There was a billowing of foam and white spray and suddenly the whaleboat was up in the air, then falling sideways as a huge humpback leapt almost clear of the waves. The tiny boat slid off the whale’s back like it was just another droplet of water and landed on its side, sails flat to the waves. I could see a yellow flash of Artemesia’s lifejacket as she was tossed into the maelstrom.

More whales were breaching now, some just blowing spray into the air while others leapt and twisted, the white flashes of their bellies showing through the blue-green water. Caught in the middle of these leviathan aquarobics was the tiny yellow dot that was their strongest champion. There
must have been thirty of the huge mammals, and I couldn’t imagine what Artemesia must have been thinking out there, all alone with her beloved whales.

There was one final flurry and a massive tail smacked down with a sound that carried clearly to the shore, and then they were gone.

The ocean returned to a steady swell, and the hull of the capsised whaleboat bobbed on the waves, but there was nothing else. No sign of the yellow lifejacket or Artemesia’s white hair. Did whales swim along with their mouths open? Could a whale actually swallow a person whole? There it was again – that question which had led to my traumatic expulsion from Sunday School and dashed my hopes of playing the third Wise Man in the Christmas pageant.

On the horizon, I could just make out the shape of the USS
Altoona
. Pretty soon there would be a heavily armed shore party trampling through the orchards and all over the vegetable garden, looking for the second missing warhead so that everyone could return to the happy state of being able neither to confirm nor deny their existence.

Would the Americans take the nukes back now, I wondered, scared off by the close call? Or would Operation Chester still go ahead? We’d probably never know. All those involved in the scheme would close ranks and deny everything.

I heard the crunch of pebbles and Julie was beside me, her submachine gun hooked back across her chest in the combat harness.

‘Well, it looks like you’re going to be the golden-haired boy in Canberra for a minute or two,’ she said.

‘Only if I keep my mouth shut. And that’s going to come at a price. I think Peter Sturdee is odds on to get reinstated and promoted, don’t you?’

‘Definitely. But only after he and all the Sturdees have had a nice little holiday in Tahiti, with hot and cold running babysitters, all at the government’s expense.’

‘I like the way you think, Ms Danko.’

I picked up a flat pebble from the stony beach and spun it out onto the bay. It skipped four times across the water. Julie picked up a pebble, crouched low, and let it go with a lightning flick of her wrist. Five, dammit.

‘Not bad for a girl in full battledress and armed to the teeth,’ I said.

She grinned. ‘It’s all in the wrist, Alby,’ and I wasn’t sure if we were still talking about skipping pebbles.

I was searching for just the right response when she was suddenly in my arms and I was falling backwards. As I hit the beach with Julie on top of me, I might have thought all my Christmases had come at once, if it hadn’t been for the staccato, breathy, cough-like exhalations caused by the impact of the bullets from Chapman Pergo’s submachine gun slamming into Julie’s back.

Pergo was firing on full auto and on the run, so how he managed to hit Julie right between the shoulderblades was beyond me. I could hear Ed yelling and then everything went into slow motion. Pergo was closing in on us, spurts of dust kicking up from under his pounding feet and a crazed look in his eyes. He might not have been much chop as a boxer, but a nine-mil submachine gun at close range packs more than enough punch to put someone on the canvas and keep them there.

Julie’s eyes were closed and her face was ashen. As I struggled to ease her off me, my hand closed round the grip of the submachine gun strapped to her chest. My thumb must have pushed the fire selector up from SAFE to FULL AUTO by reflex, and as Pergo lifted his weapon and screamed,
‘Fuck You, Murdoch!’
I twisted Julie’s inert body clear and squeezed the trigger.

The noise was deafening and I felt a sudden burning sensation in my chest. I thought for a moment that Pergo had shot me, but it was only the red-hot brass shell casings ejected from Julie’s submachine gun pressing into my skin. The impact of my slugs knocked Pergo backwards, and from somewhere in the distance an SAS trooper emptied the magazine of his Browning into the bastard’s back. It was damn good shooting at that range, and bloody amazing for someone firing from a sitting position. Pergo was down for the count, and this time it was permanent.

Ed was suddenly beside us and he pulled Julie’s body off me. ‘That Cristobel bird passed out,’ he said, ‘and when the SAS bloke turned to check on her Pergo biffed him with a rock and took his gun. Oh Jesus, Alby, is she hurt bad?’

Then an SAS medic was pushing me aside and tearing off Julie’s gun harness and ripping at the Velcro side tabs on her bulletproof vest. I tilted her head back and made sure the airway was clear before I started giving her mouth-to-mouth. Her eyes flickered open for a moment and closed again. The Kevlar vest was off now and the medic expertly ran a pair of scissors up the front of her black rollneck. Underneath she was wearing a lacy black bra and for one bizarre moment I wondered if it was SAS issue.

‘Roll her,’ the medic grunted. ‘But carefully.’

Even at a distance I could see the chopped flesh of Pergo’s torso, but when we turned Julie over, although her back was a mass of rapidly blackening bruises, the skin was
unbroken. The medic reached for the discarded bulletproof vest and inspected it. Through the torn fabric and ripped fibres, I could make out the nicked and dented ceramic insert plate that had saved her life. The medic counted the dents.

‘Five hits,’ he said. ‘She’s a bloody lucky girl.’

‘No major damage, then?’

‘Not that I can see. Hopefully it’s nothing worse than bruising, and I think she was winded by the impact. Might have cracked a rib or two, though, so we need to get her to a hospital.’

More SAS troopers were around us now, and as they wrapped Julie in a silver space blanket, I heard someone radio for a medivac chopper. It was over us in seconds, lowering a metal stretcher basket by winch. As they strapped her in, her eyes flickered open again and she turned her head in my direction. A strap was holding her arms by her side and her right index finger beckoned me. I leaned over her, putting my ear close so I could hear above the noise of the chopper.

‘Just a tip, Alby,’ she whispered. ‘Next time you give someone mouth-to-mouth, no tongues, eh?’

‘You started it.’ I gave her a smile and then she was gone, the Blackhawk heading for Hobart before they’d even finished winching in the stretcher.

Adamek Island was suddenly very quiet. The SAS medics were gathered round the injured trooper who’d somehow managed to down Pergo at maximum pistol range, even though he was slightly concussed. These blokes were
bloody tough – tough as Tasmanian miners – but then they’d have to be to keep up with Julie.

Thankfully, someone had thrown a tarp over Pergo’s body, weighing it down with half a dozen rocks and improving the view considerably. I knew nothing could bring Max back but I was glad to see this evil prick dead.