Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  During Mac’s military days in the early 1990s, he’d been team leader on a recon tab across Scotland, one of those exercises where you learned to cover ground by night and keep a proper reconnaissance log of what you’d seen: the height of the rivers, livestock movements, electricity workers, telecom trucks, loggers, surveyors, hunter camps and so on. One of the team tore an ankle ligament and in the kerfuffle Mac forgot to take his trigs and match them with the map; by the time they struck camp and he’d made his six am radio call to the instructors, he couldn’t state his team’s exact position.

  The chief instructor, a legendary warrant officer named Banger Jordan, had told him, ‘Then you’d better pull your head out of your arse and take a look around, you fucking tit.’

  Mac looked around now, peering beyond the tree line at the back of the garden and trying to catch glimpses of what lay beyond. The early rays of sunlight seemed to be coming from the left of the garden, meaning that was the west and he was facing north. Something glinted behind the trees but he couldn’t quite make it out.

  The door jangled as the big German deadlock shifted, and a large Samoan-Australian walked through the door with a tray of tucker.

  ‘Marlon,’ said Mac, surprised.

  ‘Who’d you expect?’ Marlon dragged a stool to the bed with his foot and put the tray on it. ‘Elvis Presley?’

  ‘John Rowles would have been a start,’ said Mac, eyeing the two bacon and egg sandwiches and the plunger of coffee. Mac had busted Marlon’s shoulder a few years ago in Makassar, when the I-team had tried to retrieve him; he wondered if there was any personal enmity between them.

  Marlon smiled. ‘So, in the shit again, McQueen?’

  ‘Nah, mate,’ said Mac, hooking into the sandwich. ‘Just laying up.’

  ‘Not what I hear.’

  ‘What’d you hear?’ said Mac, always enlisting for information.

  ‘You’ve got something secret that belongs to the government,’ said Marlon. ‘And Boo’s in hospital because of it.’

  ‘Geez.’ Mac shook his head as yolk ran down his chin. ‘You believe that, Marlon?’

  ‘Don’t know what to believe with you spooks, frankly. You’re all bloody liars.’

  Mac let that one go. ‘How’s Boo?’

  ‘He’s alive, broken pelvis and collarbone – those hit-and-run boys got him good.’

  The door squeaked and Lance shoved his head into the room. His earring had made a conspicuous return.

  ‘Well?’ he said to Marlon. ‘You gonna chat him up all morning or are you gonna kiss him?’

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ said Marlon, sighing.

  ‘I need you, T’avai – now,’ Lance said, and disappeared from the door.

  Mac could see Marlon wasn’t enjoying answering to Lance, but that he wouldn’t buck the chain of command.

  Pausing at the door, Marlon smiled. ‘It’s not personal, right, McQueen?’

  ‘I forgive you, my son,’ said Mac. ‘But before I do anything else I need an eye-bath, okay? A few bottles of saline solution – the good stuff – or I won’t be talking to anyone.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll sort it,’ said Marlon, still not leaving. He cleared his throat. ‘Some of the boys said you were in the SBS – that true?’

  ‘Nah, mate,’ said Mac, which was technically the truth, since although he’d passed selection for the Special Boat Service, he’d never served in the unit. ‘Those guys are pros – I couldn’t run with them.’

  ‘But you were with the paras or marines or something?’

  ‘I drove a truck.’

  Marlon left the room, muttering to himself.

  With a full stomach, Mac now tried to get tears running in his eyes. He couldn’t open his left eye without it feeling like a Velcro strip and he wanted that saline. His reasons weren’t just medical: Mac knew that Urquhart and Lance wouldn’t have prepared the safe house like a field guy would. Experienced operators would always include a comprehensive first-aid kit, given that people had accidents and they preferred to avoid doctors and hospitals. Even toothaches could be salved with a good dentist-strength analgesic gel until the gig was finished. Office guys never thought of such mundane things.

  Mac wanted his captors to go out and buy a few bottles of saline solution, which might mean going to a drugstore or an optometrist. But it could just as easily be the public dispensary of a hospital – Mac would be able to look closely at the brand and make an assessment of his position.

  Marlon was back with the saline in what Mac estimated was between eleven and twelve minutes, and he hadn’t heard a car being started. The three bottles Marlon placed on the tallboy in Mac’s room were from a high-quality French medical supplies company, and in the two-litre size dispensed at hospitals.

  Allowing for five minutes at the dispensary to select and purchase the correct products, Mac decided there was a walk of four and a half minutes each way, which translated to about two hundred and eighty metres at a casual pace. Allowing for traffic lights, they could be as close as two hundred metres to a hospital – a major hospital, with a public dispensary issuing hospital-grade saline.

  Lance sat on a reversed chair beside Mac’s bed, Urquhart behind him on another chair.

  ‘Okay,’ said Lance. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’

  ‘Your daddy forgot to pull out,’ said Mac.

  ‘Macca!’ said Urquhart. ‘Let’s get this done and we can be on our way, okay?’

  ‘Done? I don’t see a tape recorder, I don’t see anyone taking notes,’ said Mac, ‘so I’m not exactly sure what this is.’

  ‘This is an interview, McQueen,’ said Lance, who seemed to have some product in his cropped black hair and was now dressed in Levis, cowboy boots and a loose-fitting white shirt that in Rockhampton would have been called a blouse.

  ‘Well, Lance, in an interview we record what is said or we take notes – it’s how we do it in the Firm.’ Mac tried to stay composed. ‘It avoids a small matter of ambitious little shits making political gain from a delicate situation.’

  ‘I don’t need to make political gain from you, McQueen,’ said Lance, tensing. ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

  ‘Thanks – I’ll be my guest,’ said Mac. ‘Why don’t we start with you identifying yourself and telling me who you work for?’

  ‘Why don’t we start with you fucking yourself?’ said Lance, face darkening.

  Mac smiled. ‘Sure, mate. Uncuff me and I’ll show you how that works.’

  ‘Fellers, fellers!’ Urquhart stood up. ‘I don’t have all day for this.’

  ‘Then get this silly runt out of my face, Davo, and we’ll talk,’ said Mac.

  ‘That’s not your call!’ Lance was standing now. ‘This is my gig.’

  Mac almost had the situation turned the way he wanted it.

  ‘It may be your gig, Lance, but it’s my room. And that gigolo aftershave you’re swimming in? It’s not working for you, champ.’

  Lance bunched his fists and moved towards Mac. ‘You’re a fucking –’

  ‘Lance!’ said Urquhart, leaping in front of his protégé, holding him by the arm.

  Walking Lance towards the door, Urquhart gave him a small push.

  ‘Get a haircut!’ said Mac as Lance left, raising a middle finger.

  ‘Fuck you, McQueen,’ came Lance’s voice from the corridor.

  ‘I catch you again, I’ll put a number two across your head, mate!’ said Mac as loud as he could. ‘Swear to God, sunshine – I’ll hold you down and shear you like a bloody Merino.’

  Taking Lance’s chair as a door slammed on the far side of the house, Urquhart gave Mac a look. ‘All done? Can we talk now?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac, as somewhere in the neighbourhood the morning prayers started. Another landmark: a mosque. That was the golden glint he’
d seen through the trees. Close to a mosque and close to a hospital with a dispensary. That probably meant he was in a leafy enclave of colonial homes on Boeng Kak Lake, over the road from the mosque and alongside the sprawling compound of Calmette Hospital.

  ‘Mate,’ said Urquhart, ‘I need that memory card and I need it now.’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ said Mac, pushing a second pillow against the bedhead to get comfortable. ‘What’s on it?’

  ‘I can’t disclose that,’ said Urquhart, not looking smug for once. ‘I’m not messing with you – I just can’t tell you.’

  ‘I could be of more help if I was trying to get it back.’ Mac held up his cuffed wrist.

  ‘I know,’ said Urquhart. ‘But this is eyes-only – PM’s office.’

  Raising his eyebrows, Mac wondered if he’d ever encountered such a level of secrecy while in the field. ‘The air gets thin up there, mate.’

  ‘I know,’ said Urquhart. ‘As soon as Lance told me you had the card, we had to retrieve it and we had to put you in a security bubble.’

  ‘You hired Lance to do this?’

  ‘You were the first person I thought of, Macca, and the only person who would just get it done. But you told me to fuck off.’

  ‘Where’d you find him?’ said Mac, needing more.

  ‘AG’s.’ That meant ASIO. ‘But he’s a favourite of the PM – he’s done a lot of sensitive burrowing, if you know what I mean.’

  Sensitive burrowing for the Prime Minister’s office usually meant ferreting the real story out of an ongoing gig and bringing the snippets back to the PM’s desk. Sometimes the burrower was also a provocateur, twisting and influencing a report to create a more convenient outcome. Some of the most potentially damaging ASIS and military intelligence reports on Beijing and Jakarta had felt the guiding hand of the burrower over the years – burrowers were a hazard of spooking, but they usually didn’t look as out of place as Lance.

  ‘Well, I don’t have the memory card now,’ said Mac.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ said Urquhart, looking a bit like a tortoise sticking his head out of its shell after a long sleep. He was a very different man when out of the snake pits of Canberra.

  ‘It fell off Jim Quirk’s computer,’ said Mac, thinking back. ‘In the Mekong Saloon.’

  ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘You’re not cleared for this, Dave,’ said Mac. ‘I answer to Scotty and Tobin.’

  ‘I’ve seen the report – you were present at Jim Quirk’s murder. I just want to know about the SD card.’

  Mac didn’t have much more to add. ‘The shooter was trying to fiddle with the computer keyboard before he shot Jim. There was a lot of action around that machine before Jim died and I saw this card fall to the floor – I picked it up out of habit as I left.’

  ‘These killers –’

  ‘Probably Israeli.’

  Urquhart squinted. ‘So you have the memory card and you carry it into Phnom Penh, and then what?’

  ‘Someone steals it from my bag,’ said Mac.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night, before I went to fallback with Lance.’

  ‘This was at the Cambodiana?’ said Urquhart.

  ‘How do you know?’ said Mac, alert.

  ‘Made a hell of an exit,’ said Urquhart.

  ‘Christ’s sake! You were there?’

  Urquhart shrugged. ‘Only once the place was on fire and the ambulance guys were scraping a security guard off the car park.’

  ‘What were you doing there?’ said Mac, trying to assess how much Urquhart knew.

  ‘Lance said the memory card was in your backpack – we were going up to the room to grab it.’

  Mac thought about the timelines. ‘So you were at the hospital together, with Boo?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Nope,’ said Urquhart, shaking his head. ‘Lance called me from a bar after he’d left Calmette – said you were AWOL and the SD card was in a pocket of your backpack. So we met at the Cambodiana.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Mac, getting an insight into how the Israelis had intercepted that information.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you blokes should stick to your whiteboards and political lunches,’ said Mac, trying to control his fury.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there’s a young Cambodian who’s dead because your buddy Lance doesn’t know his craft.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Urquhart.

  ‘Lance has changed his clothes, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Urquhart. ‘He brought them with him.’

  ‘Bring them here, but let’s talk about Super 14 for the next three minutes.’

  Urquhart came back into the room with two handfuls of clothes and threw them on Mac’s lap. ‘But anyway, Berrick Barnes seems to be thriving with the Waratahs.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mac, running his hands over the chinos and the trop shirt. ‘flaming traitor.’

  ‘Be great to see the Reds put some form on the field this year,’ said Urquhart, peering closer at the clothes.

  Mac found what he was looking for and held it up: a metal sphere the size of a ball bearing, with a dozen small wire hooks, that had been hanging from the black cotton under Lance’s collar. It was a micro-transmitter of the type that only had enough battery power to transmit for twelve to fourteen hours but which picked up most conversational speech for about five feet around it.

  ‘Yeah, mate,’ said Mac, careful not to touch the sphere and let its owner know it had been found. ‘I want John Roe back in a Reds jumper. He’s hell when he’s well.’

  Handing the clothes back, Mac pointed to the door. When Urquhart returned, his waxy Canberra pallor was more grey than usual.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, sitting and rubbing a hand up over his face and hair. ‘That was a microphone? They were listening to everything Lance was saying?’

  ‘Within range, yeah,’ said Mac.

  ‘So they heard where the memory card was and beat us to it?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac. ‘That’s how it goes in this game.’

  ‘But how did they get close enough to plant this thing on him?’ asked Urquhart.

  ‘Pretty girl, alone at a bar, asks a bloke to talk about himself,’ said Mac with a wry smile. ‘If you think it’s too good to be true, you’re probably right.’

  Chapter 30

  Lying on his back, Mac squirted saline into each eyeball, blinking it out again. As his eyes slowly cleaned themselves, he tried to work out what parts of this gig to lie about and what to come clean on.

  Lance and Urquhart had obviously tailed him after the Singapore fiasco and it would have been within Urquhart’s power in Australian intelligence to have Mac assigned to the Jim Quirk tail. Mac was inclined to believe Urquhart: he’d genuinely wanted Mac to help him weed out the potential traitor who set up Ray Hu. And Mac had genuinely turned him down, at which point Urquhart opted for having Mac assigned to Saigon.

  But the routine tail-and-report of Quirk had turned nasty and suddenly Lance was in a van with Mac, seeing the memory card. Lance must have felt the ends coming together quite easily. But then Boo Bray was run over and before Lance could double back to the Cambodiana and grab the memory card, the Israelis had intercepted Lance’s ill-advised call and grabbed it, leaving Lance and Urquhart looking like a couple of dilettantes.

  Mac could only surmise what was on that card. What worried him was a series of violent attacks from the Israelis, culminat- ing in a light-bulb bomb at the Cambodiana; that is, a light bulb filled with a fuel-oil accelerant such as ammonia nitrate and a small flash-detonator in place of the filament. You didn’t need a huge amount of explosive in a small area like a bathroom – there was nowhere for the blast to go except out the door, where the victim should be standing at the li
ght switch.

  Someone from Israeli intelligence would know how to make such a bomb. One of the best technical rotations Mac had ever done was with the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal spy agency. Most field operators in the Shin Bet became proficient in making IEDs, so they knew a bomb factory when they saw one, and in many cases could smell a bomb-maker if they were standing beside him.

  What Mac didn’t understand was how Ray Hu came into it.

  For now, Mac needed to get out of the safe house before Urquhart or Lance came back with questions about the shootout at the docks the night before. Mac had his own questions about that incident and he had two main priorities that had nothing to do with the memory card: he wanted to find Tranh, and to do that he might need Sam’s help. And then he had some payback planned for that Israeli hit man with the mad eyes.

  Mac had one thing going for him: Lance had failed to find Mac’s backpack or the van. Mac reckoned the backpacks and cell phone tracker were safe in the room registered under the name of Sam Chan until Phnom Penh police reported to the Australian Embassy that they’d found the ‘lost’ van. Mac had given his vehicle rego as the Mazda’s. The van wouldn’t be found immediately, but before it was Mac needed to get out of the house.

  His black baseball cap was hooked over the back of the chair near the door, and he had an idea.

  Eighteen minutes later the deadlock rattled and Marlon brought Mac’s lunch into the room, dragged the stool over with his foot and put down the sandwich and a can of Tiger.

  ‘I’m liking your taste in food, Marlon,’ said Mac, eyeing the sandwich. ‘Ham, cheese and tomato – perfect with a cold beer.’

  Smiling, Marlon turned to go. ‘By the way, I was at the embassy this morning and I bumped into Alex Beech.’