Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Oh, you don’t know?’ said Dozsa, his eyes losing their hard- ness and warming to laughter. ‘Ha – those Americans are funny, aren’t they?’

  ‘What are you –?’

  ‘They didn’t tell you about the girl?’

  ‘McHugh?’

  ‘Yes, her,’ said Dozsa, covering his mouth as his laughter triggered a smoker’s cough. ‘I like you, McQueen, but you sure missed that one.’

  ‘What one?’

  ‘Geraldine McHugh,’ said Dozsa. ‘She was the currency protocols.’

  Climbing to the bushy saddle that led out of the valley, Mac stopped the LandCruiser, looked back and saw a white Falcon corporate jet flattening out and preparing to land on the compound’s airstrip. The place was clearing out and the currency had already flown – Mac felt exhausted and beaten. He’d spent the past week chasing Geraldine McHugh only to learn that she was a spy rather than a hostage.

  Which left the memory chip and Jim Quirk. If the memory card didn’t have the currency protocols, what was on the chip and what was Quirk working on?

  And where were the hundreds of billions in US currency?

  The drive took almost as long as the footpad they’d followed Tani across the night before. It was barely wide enough to allow a vehicle through and was punctuated by boggy creek crossings and deep wash-outs. A two-wheel-drive vehicle would not have made it.

  Mac listened to a rural Cambodian radio service that played cover versions of Debbie Boone and Anne Murray and he tried to come up with a plan. He felt snookered in one sense – Aussie hostages always changed the approach. But there were other ways forwards, perhaps. The memory chip was a plus, if he could find it without Grimshaw knowing. Also, McHugh was alive and she could be debriefed, as could Sammy Chan; he didn’t know how he was going to make use of Sammy, but the American knew more than he was telling and he’d have to be questioned. If he turned up.

  After two hours of driving, Mac had left the highlands and come down to the warmer, monkey-infested climbs of the Mekong river flats. Easing through the dappled light of the jungle, he found the thick bush area near where they’d stowed the Silverado and motorbikes.

  Turning up the radio, Mac eased quietly from the idling LandCruiser and limped downhill to the creek bed where they’d left the vehicles.

  Eyeing the Silverado through the foliage, Mac cased the area and walked slowly around it for ten minutes, looking for people, smelling for cigarettes and aftershave, and keeping his eyes open for trip wires and other nasties.

  Moving forwards, wincing at every cracking twig and annoyed at the constant hubbub of monkeys talking to birds, Mac finally got to the Yamaha he’d been riding the night before. Kneeling, he looked for IEDs, opened sumps, drained gas tanks – all the standard sabotages designed to either kill or frustrate the enemy. It looked clean and the keys were still in the ignition, where he’d left them. Pulling the seat up on its sideways hinge, Mac found the Nokia, also where he’d left it.

  Approaching the Silverado’s king cab he looked in the tinted windows. It was unoccupied. Lying under the cab, Mac checked for unwanted wires and packages, and checked the brake lines. The light-bulb bomb was still fresh in his mind and he was hypersensitive to the idea of an IED exploding in his face.

  The new-car smell wafted as Mac sat in the driver’s seat and rummaged in the centre console and the glove box, and had an extended look around the ignition assembly and under the steering column, looking for tampering. The keys were on the sunshade and there was a stash of US twenty-dollar notes in the console, which he trousered. But Mac couldn’t find what he was looking for: Tranh’s red phone and a first-aid kit.

  The rear seats of the king cab were clean too, except for several discarded water bottles. Reaching back he pulled down the rear seat’s centre console and found the green nylon bag with a white cross on the cover. Riffling through it he found the T3s and popped two of the painkillers in his mouth, noting the saline vials and the iodine wash that would come in handy when he re-dressed his bullet wound. There was also a plastic bag on the floor of the crew cab containing a change of clothes. Pulling them out and checking the sizes, Mac stripped out of his possibly bugged clothing and changed into the new fatigues.

  Grabbing the keys, Mac headed for the rear of the pick-up truck.

  He needn’t have bothered with the keys – the closed-in rear section of the Chev was open and as he pushed up the tinted window door, he noticed two things at once: Sammy had packed enough ordnance to take down a mid-sized military base; and the handgun aimed at his nose was cocked before his eyes could widen in surprise.

  ‘Halt,’ said the girl, her grip steady and eyes levelled.

  ‘Tani?’ said Mac, his heart bouncing as he raised his arms.

  ‘That you, mister?’ said the girl. ‘Where my fifty dollar?’

  Chapter 52

  Mac checked the bags for useful weapons as Tani pulled up beside the Silverado in the LandCruiser. One thing he liked about country girls, they could drive anything.

  ‘So, the police,’ said Mac, who’d been thinking about Tani’s observation that the area around the checkpoint was crawling with cops – that was why she’d been hiding out in the Chev. ‘They uniforms – town police – or political?’

  ‘Some town police, some intel,’ she said, looking into the gear bag as he rummaged through it on the lowered tailgate.

  ‘But there’s another way, right?’ said Mac, loading and chambering a 9mm SIG handgun. ‘To the river and Kratie, I mean?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Tani, grabbing a SIG of her own from the canvas bag and inspecting it.

  ‘You can point me the way,’ said Mac.

  ‘I show,’ said Tani, slamming a clip up into the SIG’s handle.

  ‘No, you don’t have to come – this is where you belong,’ said Mac, placing his SIG on the tailgate beside the four clips of ammo.

  ‘I show,’ said Tani, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  Mac pulled another bag towards him and extracted an M4 carbine – a shortened, modern version of the classic M16, with a grenade-launcher attached under the barrel.

  ‘I’d rather go alone,’ said Mac, holding up his Nokia, annoyed that he still had no cell coverage.

  ‘That work at the river,’ said Tani, pointing at the phone. ‘Come on – I take you.’

  Shaking his head at her stubbornness, Mac stowed the M4.

  ‘I like this one,’ said Tani, holding up the SIG Sauer.

  The footpad to the Mekong was easier than the one into the hills they’d taken the night before and Mac managed to keep up with Tani’s motorbike as they puttered through the jungle.

  Yellow light filtered through the high-canopy forest creating a distinct atmosphere that existed nowhere except South-East Asia. It smelled of old smoke, wet dirt and monkey shit. As they motored past a meeting of canoe-bound peasants trading goods on a Mekong tributary, the footpad widened. After two minutes it turned into a jungle highway, populated with carts pulled by cattle and elderly forest people pushing handcarts and carrying poles of catfish across their shoulders. Whenever he heard an Australian complaining of how hard he worked, Mac always reminded himself of Indochina and what most eighty-year-olds did just to fill their bellies.

  Emerging on the road that followed the western side of the Mekong, Mac stopped behind Tani’s bike and they cut their engines.

  As Mac dismounted, a small group of farmers wandered off the road onto the jungle footpad. The one at the back knew Tani and stopped for a chat.

  ‘Police and intel, they gone,’ said Tani, as her friend rejoined the group.

  ‘Good,’ said Mac, relieved. ‘Probably best you don’t talk about me.’ Flicking Tani three US twenties, Mac asked for the SIG to be returned. ‘Trust me, you don’t want this to be the talk of the village when the intel comes back.’
r />   ‘I not tell about you, mister,’ said Tani, big eyes and serious mouth.

  ‘Great,’ said Mac. ‘But I need that gun.’

  A tinker moved past them, a whole pile of junk on a cart pulled by a mini horse. Holding up a plastic bag containing his discarded clothes, Mac offered it and the tinker grabbed the bag with a toothless smile, looking through it before tossing it in with the rest of his stuff. It wasn’t a high-tech tactic, but it might get Dozsa confused for a few hours about where his messenger had gone.

  ‘Okay, keep it,’ said Mac, as Tani made to go. ‘But someone asks you about me or the weapon, tell them the truth. No heroes, okay?’

  Watching Tani park her bike and walk north with a wave, Mac pulled his Nokia from his breast pocket and fossicked a bottle of water from the canvas bag on the bike’s carrier. Dialling, he waited and recognised the Aussie voice that answered.

  ‘Scotty – Mac,’ he said, gulping at the water.

  ‘The fuck are you?’ said Scotty. ‘What happened to the regular updates?’

  ‘Sorry – been out in the forest.’

  ‘Where?’ said Scotty.

  ‘Chamkar,’ said Mac. ‘I need to meet.’

  ‘I’m in Phnom,’ said Scotty. ‘Setting up a forward base in case you get into trouble.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m in trouble,’ said Mac. ‘Meet me in Kratie at the Sunset guest house. It’s three miles south of town, on the highway.’

  After a shower in the bathroom at the end of the upstairs hall, Mac secured his room and washed the bullet hole in his calf with saline and then with the iodine solution. Dabbing it dry with a towel, gasping at the sting of the iodine, Mac restrapped himself with bandages from the American first-aid kit and grabbed a cold beer from the fridge.

  Moving to the side of the window, he peeked out from behind the curtains to scour the bare dirt courtyard at the entrance to the Sunset, looking for signs of Mossad or maybe even Cambodian intel. He’d hated that story of the Dozsa crew executing the Mossad team at the guest house and he worried it might be a habit of theirs.

  The entrance seemed clear. Now Mac wanted some sleep before Scotty arrived.

  Picking up the discarded bandages, Mac chucked them at the rubbish bin as he walked to the bed.

  Pausing as he lay on the primrose-coloured cotton blanket, he tried to filter his senses for what was wrong. Sitting in complete silence, frozen in that spot, he breathed shallowly and wondered what was out of place.

  The pinging, he thought as he rose and walked to the steel rubbish bin. Why would a handful of crepe make that sound on steel? He’d reused the elastic claws on his new dressing – there was nothing hard to bounce off the steel.

  Pulling the tangle of dirty bandages out of the bin, he held them up, examining them closely. Sitting in a row along the still-white inside fold of the crepe were three small black dots, each the size of a plastic pin-head. Flicking one with his forefinger, the dot stayed attached to the bandage, held in place with the tiny Velcro-like hooks that surrounded its sphere.

  ‘The bastards,’ thought Mac.

  Dozsa’s crew had patched him up okay, but they’d planted a bunch of micro-dots in his dressings. Sometimes those things picked up conversations, but mostly they were highly effective location and tracking devices, totally hidden from all but the most paranoid victims.

  Dressing in ninety seconds, Mac grabbed his backpack and left.

  The red Nissan Maxima pulled up in front of the roadside soda shack just under an hour later, Scotty giving a small wave over the steering wheel as the tyres crunched on the pebbles. Mac stayed at his table out of the sun and sipped at his orangeade while he waited to get a proper look at who was occupying the passenger seat. Hand slipping into his backpack, Mac gripped the SIG and waited for the mystery man to show himself.

  Walking around the Nissan, Scotty stretched and shook out a smoke.

  ‘Macca,’ he said, eyeing the orange drink. ‘And two of those, thanks, champ,’ he said to the owner.

  The passenger door opened as Scotty lit his smoke and sat opposite Mac. Out of the car stepped a powerful man of medium height who scoped every sniper’s vantage point in a single instant.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Mac, relaxing and taking his hand out of the backpack. ‘I asked for assistance and they sent the cavalry.’

  ‘Hey, Macca,’ said Sandy Beech, eyes scanning the surrounds like a radar as he walked from the Nissan. ‘On the sugar water, mate – doctor’s orders?’

  ‘Yardarm’s cooling off,’ said Mac, standing and shaking hands with the ex-SAS soldier and spook.

  Sandy Beech was a surprise. Military intelligence working with Aussie SIS? Not unheard of, but usually an arrangement fully declared from the outset. Sitting, they hooked into their orangeades. Mac smiled and went with the jokes, but Beech’s appearance was irritating. Sandy Beech didn’t go into the field to resolve issues – his job was to escalate them.

  ‘First thing we have to get organised,’ said Mac, ‘the US currency coming out of that place – it’s real. Real security features, real paper, real serial numbers.’

  ‘Didn’t the Yanks have a UAV on it?’ said Scotty.

  ‘US Navy had a Hawk,’ said Mac. ‘Can we get word to the American side that there’s between a hundred and two hundred billion worth of bad hundred-dollar notes that got flown out of there last night?’

  Standing, Scotty walked into the car park and keyed his phone.

  As Scotty spoke, Mac explained to Beech the night at the camp and, with a slight stammer of embarrassment, admitted that Dozsa now had two Australian hostages where he previously only had one.

  ‘The Yanks are on it,’ said Scotty, sitting again. ‘That Grimshaw’s a strange fish, isn’t he?’

  ‘What’s up?’ said Mac.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Scotty shrugged. ‘They’re tracking all this US currency so they can seize it, but Grimshaw doesn’t seem that interested.’

  ‘It’s been a long week?’ said Mac.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Scotty, not convinced. ‘So where’s the McHugh bird?’

  ‘Bongo retrieved her,’ said Mac, the words choking in his throat.

  ‘Morales has McHugh?’ said Scotty.

  ‘When I arrived to work with the Americans, they’d hired a couple of mercenaries, to even it up with Dozsa’s guys.’

  ‘Bongo, and . . . ?’ said Beech.

  ‘An Aussie soldier called Didge,’ said Mac. ‘I’ve worked with him before – 4RAR Commandos.’

  ‘I know him,’ said Beech. ‘Name’s Yorantji – Adam Yorantji. Good soldier, top operator.’

  ‘The Yanks didn’t know that Bongo had been hired by the McHugh family.’

  ‘And you didn’t tell them?’ said Scotty, ticked off.

  ‘I wanted to do the gig and get out of there,’ said Mac. ‘Bongo and Didge are experts at this stuff, especially in the jungle, and we had a deal.’

  ‘A deal?’ Scotty lit another smoke. ‘Shit, mate – you had a deal with the Commonwealth.’

  ‘We were going to retrieve McHugh jointly but then Sammy Chan tried to kill her and my leg stopped one of his bullets.’

  Scotty and Beech both looked away.

  ‘What’s this about, Scotty?’ said Mac. ‘You knew what Sammy was up to?’

  ‘I knew the Americans were very serious about this,’ said Scotty, clearing his throat. ‘I knew they didn’t want us debriefing her – that was our deal.’

  ‘You had a deal with the Commonwealth, boss.’

  ‘Fair call,’ said Scotty. ‘All I can think is that when Sammy realised that you and Bongo would end up with McHugh, he tried to drop her. They’re in damage-control mode.’

  ‘Macca, we’re out of time,’ said Sandy Beech, impatient. ‘What was the errand for Dozsa?’

 
‘He wants a swap – he hands over Lance and Urquhart, and I give him a memory chip.’

  ‘A memory chip?’ Beech sat up and folded his fingers through each other on the table.

  ‘That’s what he said – he reckons Tranh was carrying it in his Nokia, but Grimshaw doesn’t know that.’

  Scotty swapped a quick glance with Beech.

  ‘So, you’re supposed to do what?’ said Beech.

  ‘Steal it and exchange it for the hostages,’ said Mac.

  ‘You know what to look for?’ said Beech, his voice now intense.

  ‘Of course,’ said Mac, shrugging. ‘It was in my backpack for a couple of days.’

  Beech looked stunned. ‘Macca, you were in possession of this chip?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac. ‘It’s a white SD.’

  ‘A white SD,’ said Beech, looking away in disgust.

  ‘I’ve said enough,’ said Mac. ‘Someone tell me what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘Mate, we have to find it,’ said Scotty. ‘But there’s no way it can get to Dozsa.’

  ‘Or Pao Peng,’ said Beech.

  ‘What’s it got to do with the counterfeiting scam?’ Mac asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Beech, gulping at the orange drink. ‘The currency just gives Pao Peng the keys to the kingdom. This chip allows him to start a war.’

  ‘What – against the Yanks?’ said Mac.

  ‘Forget the Americans,’ said Beech. ‘This is much closer to home and it’s a nightmare.’

  Chapter 53

  The late afternoon showers were finished by seven o’clock, leaving the trees dripping with water and the crickets rubbing their legs.

  Dressing in the civvie clothes Scotty had bought at the riverside market in Kratie, Mac shoved the SIG into his waistband at the small of his back and pulled on a black baseball cap. They’d eaten in a restaurant to the north of the town and were now cruising back through the busy streets towards the Palace Guest House, a few blocks east of downtown.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Mac as they slid past the two-storey French-colonial mansion they’d based themselves in twenty-four hours ago and which Grimshaw still used as a base.