Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  That was the enigma of Vietnam: the friendliest violent place on earth.

  Chapter 11

  Walking with the one-way traffic flow of Dong Khoi Street, Mac kept his pace to a relaxed tourist stroll. Wearing the Aussie traveller uniform of boardies and surf T-shirt, he could also be mistaken for an Aussie soldier on leave if the political police were being nosey.

  The temperature had climbed over thirty-five degrees by Mac’s estimation as he crossed Dong Khoi Street at the riverfront lights and walked into the Hotel Majestic. Maintaining his languid pace, he crossed through the vaulted foyer and into a cafe before spilling out onto the riverside boulevard on the other side of the building.

  Walking to the tourist information pillar, he grabbed a visitor’s map and positioned himself to see who or what would follow. Seven seconds later, two men on a Honda step-through accelerated around the corner with the rest of the traffic, the pillion passenger anxiously looking into the Majestic’s wide windows. When he hit the driver on the shoulder to stop and started getting off the bike, Mac walked towards them, map in hand.

  ‘Excuse me, fellers,’ he said, coming alongside the motorbike’s driver, a late-twenties Khmer wearing a Yankees cap and aviators. ‘Looking for the ANZ bank – it’s around here, right?’

  The driver shrugged and pointed to the pillion passenger, who swaggered towards Mac, the minicam in his left palm disappearing into the pocket of his windbreaker.

  ‘Xin chao,’ said Mac with a smile and quick bow. ‘I’m from Australia, looking for the ANZ. Name’s Richard.’

  The pillion guy waved away the hand Mac offered. ‘You want bank – go down to round ’bout, then left,’ he said carefully, like someone who didn’t want to miss the ‘ft’ sound that so many Asians couldn’t quite reach. ‘Bank there, okay?’

  ‘Thanks, champion,’ said Mac, turning and crossing Dong Khoi Street again.

  Casing the Black Stork tailor shop in a small side street off Dong Khoi, Mac took his time. It was a little after two pm when he entered the shop. Moving into the cool darkness, he walked towards the stooped old man behind the huge cutting desk but caught sight of Tranh peering through the fitting-room curtains.

  Mac followed Tranh into the hall of mirrors of the fitting room.

  ‘Get eyes?’ said Mac, looking around the musty old space. ‘On Apricot?’

  ‘I did what you say,’ said Tranh, keeping his shades on.

  ‘Stayed back?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Richard,’ said Tranh. ‘He left the consulate at eight past twelve, I followed him along Ton Duc and he got cyclo.’

  ‘Return?’

  ‘Yes, mister – he come back one-forty.’

  ‘Same cyclo?

  ‘No – he change.’

  Mac wanted a local’s view of Quirk. ‘How’s he looking?’

  ‘He not so young no more,’ said Tranh with a shrug. ‘Maybe too much the coffee or the wine?’

  ‘Okay, let’s have a chat,’ said Mac.

  He followed Tranh up a flight of stairs and through an old door into a reminder of French-colonial Saigon. The twelve-foot ceilings and the slow fan created an eerie theatre for the tailor’s dummies and old bolts of cloth. Pushing open large wooden French doors, Mac eased into the heat of the day beneath a veranda and glanced up and down the street.

  ‘Show me the back,’ said Mac, and they moved through the storage area and onto the rear patio where a table and chair were set up on the tiled slab, overlooked by several new skyscrapers.

  ‘Good,’ said Mac, walking back into the room. ‘From now on, you don’t come here, okay, Tranh?’

  ‘Sure, boss.’

  ‘We change the meet each day – we’ll rotate four venues. But you don’t come to this one, got it? This is the fallback meet.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Tranh.

  Leaving the Black Stork, Mac eyed a white Toyota Camry he recognised from before he went into the tailor’s. It was parked on the other side of the road. It wouldn’t have been odd that it was still there, except this time it had two people sitting in it.

  Raising his hand, he stopped the first cyclo rider and got on.

  ‘Ben Thanh market, cam on,’ said Mac, putting on his sunnies as he pulled the sunshade over his head. Mac liked cyclos for counter-surveillance because the cyclo rider sitting at the rear of the vehicle gave him an excuse to turn in his seat and talk, allowing him a view of the tail.

  ‘Nice day for it,’ said Mac with a smile. ‘Rain held off.’

  As they turned right and headed for Le Loi, Mac looked past the rider’s legs and saw the white Camry pull out of its parking space and follow slowly.

  Sitting back, he let the middle-aged rider work up a sweat as they pedalled along Le Loi and up to the sprawling market building with the clock tower.

  At the rear of the market, Mac hopped out and made his way into the building as the white Camry stopped a hundred metres back. He had no idea who was in that car, but in South-East Asia a Camry pulling out five seconds after you left was usually the wrong kind of attention. Maintaining a brisk pace through the crowd, he navigated the tiny aisles, heading for one of the far corners where men’s shirts hung thirty feet in the air. The noise was deafening – Ben Thanh was the biggest and most central market in Saigon, and it was so chaotic that he could barely hear himself think.

  Pushing diagonally across the teeming space, Mac finally got to the men’s section. Catching the eye of the bloke with the black money-belt and the thirty-foot pole with the hook on the end, Mac pulled out a small wad of US dollars.

  ‘I need a red shirt, for dance club,’ said Mac. ‘Black pants – nice pants. A belt, black shoes, and . . .’ He turned and searched across the sea of Vietnamese faces until he saw the hat store. ‘A hat,’ he said. ‘Big white hat, okay?’

  Eyeing the money, the trader handed his hook to a sidekick and started yelling orders at his people, pushing, jostling and cajoling. In Australia it would be called harassing an employee; in Saigon it was called service.

  Mr Hook pushed forwards the young fellow who’d arrived back with a couple of red shirts and a selection of black pants. Taking the combo that made him look least like a pimp, Mac slipped into the makeshift changing room that sat between the racks of knock-off polo shirts and the shelves of counterfeit Billabong boardies.

  Emerging, Mac let Mr Hook manhandle him, turning him around, pulling at the seams of the shirt, running his tape across Mac’s shoulders and all the time yelling at his cohorts. One got on his knees and started fiddling with Mac’s pants, but they didn’t need fixing. Whoever Mr Hook was, he’d nailed Mac’s fitting card with one look.

  ‘You are like movie star, mister,’ said Mr Hook, his smile glinting with gold. ‘I give you best, sir, and you can be in movie. My guarantee for this.’

  Another youngster arrived with three hats and two shoe boxes under his arm. Snatching them, Mr Hook snapped his fingers and a pair of black socks was placed in his hand. The first pair of shoes fitted well, and Mac took the hat that gave him a Miami trumpet-player look.

  As Mr Hook looped a belt through his pants, Mac peered between the racks of the clothing section to see if he was still being followed.

  ‘What’s the damage?’ said Mac from the side of his mouth.

  ‘For you, sir, eighty dollar,’ said Mr Hook.

  ‘Ma qua,’ said Mac, as a sidekick handed him a paper bag with his old clothes and shoes in it.

  ‘What?’ asked Mr Hook, his face confused. ‘Ma qua?’

  Mr Hook started laughing and grabbing his employees, telling them what Mac had said, all of them doubling over. In Saigon, ma qua was old haggling slang that basically translated as ‘too much’. If you had the guts to try ma qua on a market trader, and do the whole shrugging and eye-rolling song and dance, they’d reward you for it.

&nbs
p; ‘Uc, okay,’ said Mr Hook.

  ‘Saigon, okay,’ said Mac, giving him the thumbs-up.

  ‘Okay, forty dollar,’ said Mr Hook, smile suddenly gone.

  Giving him fifty, Mac grabbed his bag and moved along the menswear aisle, trying to sense where the tail was now. Adjusting his sight line, he glimpsed a person in aviator shades moving down one of the main aisles towards him. The tail hadn’t shifted his aviator sunnies since Mac had first met him on the back of the surveillance motorbike.

  Moving in the opposite direction, towards the south exit, Mac tried to make time through the mass of haggling women without attracting attention and without breaking into a sprint. He was slightly claustro at the best of times, but the tide of locals in such a confined space was messing with his breathing.

  Bursting into the heat of the early afternoon, he almost walked straight into the side of the white Camry.

  Skirting the car’s left headlight and keeping his head down, Mac averted his eyes as the person in the front seat turned to look at him. His heart thumping like a steam engine, Mac kept a steady course through the shadow of the market building as he prayed that his change of clothes had created a sufficient diversion and that no one was going to yell for him to stop. He’d have to make a decision about that: would he run, or stay and fake it out?

  The choice was clear: he wouldn’t be running – they already knew where he was staying and he had a gig to manage. That meant he’d be faking it if the cop in the car called him back. Under normal circumstances, Mac would talk a load of turkey for as long as it took. He was comfortable with his cover of Richard Davis from Southern Scholastic Books, and he’d keep it simple: he was on holiday between Singapore and Honkers, with three go-see appointments with officials in Saigon’s education board and the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Cholon – appointments that the political police could see for themselves in his diary when they searched his room.

  But as Mac walked around the rear of the market building and hailed a cyclo, he realised that things had just become more complex. The government seemed to have a team on him, never a good sign; and this wasn’t going to be about confusing some dumb-arse cop. He knew that because the cop in that car wasn’t a he – it was a she, and that was never good news for a man who lied for a living.

  Chapter 12

  The phone rang just as Mac got under the shower. Capping the water, he walked into the living area of the suite and answered.

  ‘You called?’ came the snippy voice of Chester Delaney, the Aussie consul-general, whose offices were around the corner from the Grand.

  ‘Nice to hear from you too, mate,’ said Mac, water dripping off him in the sticky heat of late afternoon. ‘Thought we could catch up for that beer.’

  Delaney sighed. ‘Where?’

  ‘Majestic roof, seventeen hundred?’

  ‘I think we can dispense with the army affectations, can’t we?’

  ‘Just testing, Chezza,’ said Mac.

  ‘And why the Majestic?’ said Delaney. ‘Can’t you come up for a coffee?’

  ‘I don’t approach consular property when I’m in the field,’ said Mac. ‘Protects me, protects you.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the diplomat. ‘Five it is.’

  Throwing a towel on the parquet floor, Mac started with fifty push-ups, followed by a hundred crunches and then forty lunges with each leg, finishing with five minutes of basic ballet exercises.

  Letting the warm shower water run off him, Mac decided on minimal involvement from the consul-general. It was courtesy for someone in Mac’s position to touch base and announce to the chief what he was doing, but in embassies and consulates the community was more like a colony – people didn’t always like a blow-in from Australia spying on one of their own. Instead, he was going to pump Delaney for background, and then have little to do with him. There was a building behind the Hotel Rex where the Australian government kept serviced offices, one of which featured the shingle Southern Scholastic Books Pty Ltd. It had secure computers and data connections, and a phone line that was virtually impossible to hack. That would be Mac’s base in Saigon, and would double as a crib should the Grand prove too open to the Cong An. The Black Stork would be the fallback.

  Drying off, Mac placed his new clothes in a paper bag and screwed it up before dressing in his chinos and polo shirt. The new clothes might trigger someone’s memory, so they’d be in a dumpster before he ventured out.

  Dialling a Singapore number, Mac walked onto the balcony, hoping that by talking outside the room he’d defeat the political police’s listening devices. His bag had been expertly looked through and his diary and book sales catalogues had been read – just as he’d wanted. But you never really knew about bugs.

  ‘Benny,’ said Mac, as Haskell came on the line. ‘How we looking?’

  Benny didn’t waste time. ‘Can you talk?’

  ‘Listening is better.’

  ‘Okay, mate – it’s good news and bad. She’s fine.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But she’s left the house and fucked off.’

  ‘Where to?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Our friends say she’s jumped a plane to Melbourne.’

  ‘Screw them,’ said Mac, who’d tell a lie like that to rival spooks as a knee-jerk reaction. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘She’s done the Harold,’ said Benny. ‘But if she’s worried about Aussie intel then I agree. Why would she be flying to Melbourne?’

  Mac rubbed his face.

  ‘There’s something we should talk about,’ said Benny, ‘and not over the phone.’

  ‘What?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Our friends’ involvement,’ said Benny.

  ‘What about it?’ said Mac, thinking the ISD had circled back after Ray’s death and kept an eye on Liesl.

  Benny’s voice lowered. ‘You’re assuming our friends became curious after a certain incident.’

  ‘What?’ said Mac.

  ‘I can’t stay on this line – I’ll call later,’ said Benny, and hung up.

  Looking at the handset as if for an answer, Mac was astonished. Singapore’s ISD had been watching Ray Hu? Had he been made as an Aussie SIS agent? That would explain why Liesl had been asked to open Ray’s safe, been taken for a long ride, had the facts of life explained before being put on a plane. It was standard procedure for intelligence services when they were clearing up a spy network: give all associates the no-tears option before moving to interrogations and lengthy trials for espionage. If that was the scenario Benny had been talking about, then Liesl would have spilled her guts and taken the fast way out. But if she was really worried about Canberra, she would have stayed in South-East Asia.

  ‘You’re not going to get me drunk, you know, McQueen,’ said Chester Delaney as the waiter deposited two more ice-cold Tigers on the table.

  They were sitting on the rooftop of the Majestic as the sun set on the Saigon River, the lush green of Vietnam’s former battlefields evident in the distance.

  ‘Don’t worry, Chezza,’ said Mac. ‘Just a couple of looseners.’

  ‘Okay, but can we drop the Chezza? It’s Chester, actually.’

  Mac raised his glass. ‘Okay, Chester.’

  Slumping slightly, Delaney removed his wire-framed glasses and massaged his eyeballs, his long fingers reaching around his bony nose.

  ‘I’m sorry, Alan,’ he said, cleaning his glasses and replacing them over piercing grey eyes. ‘I seem to get on the wrong foot with you, without ever intending to.’

  ‘Wouldn’t worry about it,’ said Mac.

  ‘I wanted to debrief, after Kuta,’ Delaney said, referring to the night of the Bali bombings, when he had been flown down from Jakarta to run the DFAT response and Mac had been sent in to control the media output. ‘I said some things that I regretted.’

>   ‘Like what? Jenny Toohey has a great arse?’

  ‘No!’ said Delaney, blushing. ‘No, when you were running around trying to find – what was it? – Pakistani terrorists, when you were supposed to be running the media side for us. I needed you, Alan, and you’d palmed it off onto those kids.’

  ‘Yeah, I did.’

  ‘I was cranky with you but, as it turned out, you were probably chasing something far more important.’

  ‘They weren’t really kids, mate,’ said Mac, remembering the young DFAT and AFP staffers who’d run the media operation under Mac’s aegis. ‘I thought they were up for it – that bird Julie was basically running the show when I got there.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ said Delaney, relaxing some more. ‘She jumped a couple of grades pretty quickly after that. Made director, last I heard.’

  ‘Let’s talk about Jim,’ said Mac.

  ‘Let’s.’

  ‘Like, what’s not in the brief?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Delaney, taking a swig of the beer. ‘The absences from his desk, the rather loose diary, and something I didn’t want to put in writing.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The Saigon chamber of commerce put on a big mining expo ten days ago, in the convention centre.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Mac.

  ‘And Jim wasn’t there.’

  ‘Not there? I thought he was the trade guy for us in Saigon?’

  ‘So did we,’ said Delaney. ‘I covered for him but it was embarrassing. We had some big companies come up here and we like to have a few beers, do a barbie and invite other nationalities over – it’s a big networking event, and Jim Quirk was AWOL.’

  ‘You must have an idea,’ said Mac, trying to work out what wasn’t being said. ‘I’m not exactly the soft option.’