‘Your boyfriend’s here,’ said Freddi, leaning down to look at his own side mirror, his hand reaching for the black SIG Sauer on his right hip.
Ari walked along the passenger side of the LandCruiser, hands up, keeping a good distance from Freddi’s door. The Russian lifted his trop shirt to show a bare belly and no holster-bag. Smart guy, thought Mac. Been in South-East Asia long enough to learn some manners.
Freddi released his gun and smiled out of his open window. ‘Ari!
What can I do for you?’
‘I am needing to speak with McQueen, please,’ he said, pointing at Mac’s door.
Freddi turned to Mac. ‘Want to speak? Don’t have to.’
Mac lifted the door latch and joined Ari. They shook and the Russian moved further from the Cruiser.
‘You ever sleep, Ari?’ asked Mac.
‘Only when I am with woman,’ Ari chuckled. ‘Timing no good.’
‘Heard anything on Hassan?’
Ari did the Russian shrug, a less dramatic version than the Javanese but more dismissive. ‘I am leaving tonight, but I feel we must stay
- how you say it - in the touch.’
‘I told you, Ari, I’ve never been on Hassan - not my end.’
‘Yes, but still you were with Atomic Energy Agency when this Khan was stopped, yes?’ said Ari. ‘And the Indonesians are using you, so this is now Samir as well, yes?’
Mac gave him the look and raised his eyebrow.
‘Okay, okay,’ said Ari, knowing he was pushing the friendship too far. ‘But too many of the secrets when we are working for same thing?
Not so good, yes?’
‘Where are you headed, Ari?’
The Russian shrugged.
‘Come on, mate, too many secrets, yes?’
Ari put his hands on his hips, looked over Mac’s shoulder, nodded slightly, and then looked back. ‘Okay. Sumatra.’
‘Not Java?’
‘No, McQueen. Sumatra.’
‘Where in Sumatra? It’s a big place.’
‘I can’t say this, you know that.’
‘Heard anything more about your colleague?’ asked Mac, thinking Ari looked a little washed out.
‘No - he is dead or he is being, umm, held,’ said Ari, slumping a little. In the spy game it was unusual for anyone to use the word torture, in the same way soldiers didn’t like directly referring to death, but Mac saw the stress in the Russian’s eyes and knew what he was saying.
Deciding if he relinquished some information it might bring some other revelations back his way, Mac said, ‘Okay, Ari. We had eyes on Samir, yesterday.’
Ari nodded.
‘It was me - I saw him,’ said Mac.
‘You were there?’ said Ari, tensing. ‘On this JI ship?’
‘Yeah, mate. Thing is, Ahmed al Akbar was with him.’
Ari went completely still for a couple of seconds, looked Mac in the eye. ‘These people are al-Qaeda, yes? And you are letting these fuckers go?’
‘Mate, I’ve said too much. Your turn.’
As Ari tried to fi nd the right words and correct level of illumination, Mac turned and saw Freddi tap his G-Shock.
‘I let him go now, Freddi - Tuhan memberkati,’ said Ari.
Freddi looked away. If you wished God’s blessings on a Javanese, it wasn’t good manners for him to reply with grumpiness.
‘I think we are looking for the same crew, yes?’ said Ari. ‘Hassan and Samir.’
Mac was getting irritated. ‘Hassan and Samir, yes. But Akbar?
Akbar is Osama’s bagman -‘
The words fell off the end of his sentence as Mac realised what he was saying.
‘You see,’ said Ari, ‘why Samir and Akbar are on same ship?’
Mac nodded, things becoming clearer.
‘It very expensive,’ said Ari, ‘for nuclear device.’
CHAPTER 12
It was a clear night as the Indonesian Huey chugged north-west. The host military had a choice whether to tell their foreign intelligence partners where they were going, and the Indon navy had decided not to.
Mac, Freddi and Purni all tried to sleep in the throbbing racket of the Huey, a Vietnam-era helo now made under licence in Indonesia.
The reliability record of the air frame and the familiar thromp of the turbo-shaft were reassuring to Mac, but it was still the loudest and most uncomfortable way to get around, even with the doors shut fast and all the high-tech damping materials they were lined with. After twenty minutes aloft Mac gave up on sleeping and saw the telltale sign of the Madura Strait, crowded with humanity on both sides, narrowing down to the huge city.
At Surabaya Naval Base an operator in pale-blue overalls and an aviator helmet escorted them across the tarmac to a white LandCruiser Prado. They were then driven across the runway to a hangar on the other side of the air wing apron, all wincing as they shot into the glare of the internal fl oodies which illuminated an air force F28. Mac’s G-Shock said it was 3.37 am.
They walked to the stairs and Freddi excused himself to go to the gents, so Purni and Mac climbed into the plane and grabbed the seats that faced each other at the front. There was a faint whining sound and the smell of avgas and institutional air freshener. The decor looked like 1986 was never going to go away and Mac briefl y worried about all those incidents in the early 1980s when Garuda seemed to kill so many people in F28s. He told himself he’d fl own safely in F28s on Ansett Airlines, and that seemed to balance the paranoia.
‘So, Purn,’ said Mac, yawning. ‘Can we talk about a destination now?’
Purni gave him a blank look and shook his head. He was well-dressed, and Mac knew from Freddi that he’d been educated at Monash University in Melbourne. Wherever you went in the world, the spy agencies were crammed with educated middle-class men trapped between the ride of their lives and the drudgery of procedure; between the fl ash of adrenaline and The Rules.
Mac fi shed in his pack and turned off both of his mobiles. If he wasn’t allowed to know where he was going then no other bastard was going to fi nd out vicariously. Freddi bounced up the stairs and sat next to Purni so that the two BAIS boys were rear-facing while Mac looked forward.
Mac settled into his seat as a loud shaking sound rattled around the cabin. Then a couple of soldiers in red berets appeared at the cabin door and waited while someone thumped up the aluminium trolley stairs behind them. Another soldier appeared holding a chain in his hand. Turning, the soldier pulled on the chain and two men in black hoods and grey pyjamas jerked in behind him, the fi rst prisoner chained to the second. The soldier leading the prisoners started down the aircraft pulling the hooded men behind him. The second prisoner had blood splashed down the front of his pyjama legs. It looked fresh and Mac thought immediately of Ari’s colleague.
The other two soldiers moved towards where Mac’s party was seated, their distinctive triangle patches with the vertical red dagger indicating they were Kopassus, Indonesian Army Special Forces.
Kopassus was one of the most-mentioned government agencies in any Amnesty International fi le-search.
Freddi smiled and chatted to the soldiers, then gestured at Mac.
‘McQueen - this is Major Benni Sudarto. We’re on his fl ight this morning.’
Mac put out his hand. ‘Thanks for the ride, Major,’ he said, all smiles.
Surdarto hesitated briefl y and then shook Mac’s hand. ‘I know you?’ he asked in mechanical English. He had a face that looked like it had been put together out of brown Lego, rectangular slabs of fl esh and bone composed his cheekbones, jaw and forehead.
Mac shrugged, looked out the window at the hangar. Benni Sudarto hadn’t changed. He was still built like a brick shithouse, was still suspicious and ill-mannered like he’d been back in ‘99, in East Timor.
Sudarto barked an order down the plane then took a pew in the facing seats on the other side of the aisle. ‘I do, don’t I?’ said Sudarto, not giving up.
There was a certain kind of Indones
ian man made of muscle and bone and nothing else, and Benni Sudarto was such a bloke. It looked like if you punched him you’d break your hand. His neck started under his ears and the rolled-up sleeves of his camo shirt revealed enormous arms.
Mac shrugged. ‘Nah, Major. Anglos, mate - we all look alike.’
Sudarto forced a laugh, then looked away.
Mac caught Freddi’s eye; the other man’s expression said, Be careful. Mac was going to be very, very careful. When he’d last seen Benni Sudarto, the Indonesian was a captain in Group 4, the Kopassus plainclothes hit squad. Back then Mac was an elusive Aussie spy in East Timor, known to the Indonesians as Kakatua, the Indon name for Timor’s cockatoo. Sudarto had hunted and Mac had evaded.
Careful didn’t get close.
They took off seven minutes later. Soon after, the crew dimmed the cabin lights and Mac eased back his seat, fl icked on his overhead reading light, reached into his pack and pulled out the stapled printouts that Garvs had organised for him. It was a ‘brief’ fi le on Hassan Ali. The covering photo showed a handsome man with intelligent, smiling eyes. The caption said Hassan was twenty-fi ve when the photo was taken in 1986.
Mac fl ipped to the second sheet of paper: Hassan was born in 1960
in Islamabad, father a lawyer, mother from a local moneyed family.
Educated in Islamabad, he’d done his master’s at the London School of Economics before returning home to Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the ISI. Hassan had started at the political rather than military level and had postings in Washington, New Delhi, Canberra and Paris.
He’d made his name in scientifi c espionage and covert procurement.
Then, after a secondment to KRL - A.Q. Khan’s nuclear laboratory - in 1997, the fi le noted that he’d fallen off the offi cial spy map.
After ‘97 Hassan was suspected of being a full-time covert operative for KRL. A note added to the bottom of the bio mentioned that the Israeli government had been building a case for the Americans to stop protecting Pakistan and Khan because Hassan Ali had been forging friendships with terror outfi ts, including those linked with Libya and Iran.
Putting the fi le back in his pack, Mac tried to put the nuke puzzle together in a way that relied on facts rather than speculation. The nuclear connections Ari had been insisting on weren’t concrete enough for Mac to accept lightly.
In the late 1990s, Mac had spent two months in the UN’s Iraq Nuclear Verifi cation Offi ce. INVO was supposed to verify a nuclear program in Iraq but it was really a bunch of MI6 and CIA true-believers bullying the nuclear engineers into verifying that old tractor parts were really part of a clandestine enrichment centrifuge. INVO
was a mess, but it had shown Mac how easily a situation could be distorted by intelligence offi cers.
Still, it had to be said that there was something compelling about Ari’s theories. The Israelis and Russians knew that Dr Khan was selling enriched uranium and centrifuge cascades; Hassan Ali was a Khan lieutenant and one of the blokes the Indian intelligence services wanted shut down. Also, Ari was putting Hassan, Akbar and Samir together in Bali on the eve of the Sari and Paddy’s bombings. Which connected a rogue nuclear program with JI and al-Qaeda.
Ari was right about one thing, thought Mac as he felt sleep coming on: a bunch of farm labourers in sarungs may have needed a general like Samir to plan a conventional bombing, but they wouldn’t need a nuclear weapons broker from Pakistan or an al-Qaeda bagman.
He wondered where they were now heading. Something told him it was right behind Ari.
CHAPTER 13
Shouts woke Mac and as he came to he felt the F28 descending.
Outside, the fi rst light of dawn was poking through the smoky blue haze of Sumatra. Glancing to his left he saw Benni Sudarto laughing with the two other soldiers. They were looking down the aisle to where someone was crying out. Mac guessed one of the prisoners had woken from a drug-induced sleep to fi nd himself hooded, and was panicking about where he was.
Sudarto’s face darkened as he yelled something down the plane.
The crying immediately dropped to a whimper. Mac looked at Freddi, who whispered, ‘The major just say to the guy, “If I have to plug your mouth I’ll do it with a size-eleven lace-up.”’
Sudarto rattled off more Bahasa, which Freddi interpreted for Mac. ‘A free service from Indonesian Army.’
The Kopassus guys slapped their thighs and Mac caught Benni Sudarto’s eye. The major winked.
Looking out the window again, Mac reckoned they were landing in Pekanbaru, which was on the east coast of Sumatra and closer to Singapore and Malaysia than to Jakarta. The haze had suggested the east coast of Sumatra but it was the F-5E Tiger fi ghter jets with the forward-sweeping wings that sealed it; Pekanbaru was the only military base on Sumatra with Tiger jets.
Freddi gestured for Mac to remain seated as the Kopassus soldiers and their prisoners disembarked and made for a large blue van.
While the F28 was being refuelled, Purni and Mac watched Freddi remonstrate with Benni Sudarto on the tarmac. After a few minutes, Freddi peeled away and came back to the F28, talking excitedly into his phone. Running to the top of the stairs, he knocked on the pilot door and barked an order. A reply came back in Bahasa, but it was a universal, Yeah, yeah.
One of the fl ight crew pulled the cabin door shut, locked it in place and asked the three of them to fasten their seatbelts as he slipped back into the cockpit. Almost immediately the revs came up and they started moving forward.
‘So, Freddi, what’s up?’ asked Mac.
‘Police from Medan chased off a plane trying to land at an old Jap airfi eld, inland from Binjai up near the national park,’ said Freddi, eyes already mad for the chase. ‘A party of eight or nine were on the ground before the landing was aborted. Now they’re on the run - two vehicles, lots of fi repower.’
The F28’s rear engines screamed and it raced down the runway as Freddi got on the phone again. Medan suited Mac - it was where his friend, Johnny Hukapa, was based.
They fl ew for twenty-fi ve minutes, talking things through on the way. It looked as if the Hassan-Akbar team was travelling as a single unit. And although the Medan POLRI had lost them, they’d done the next best thing and stopped them leaving the country. For now, anyway, they were trapped in the wild west of Sumatra.
‘When you say fi repower, Freddi, what are we looking at?’ asked Mac.
‘Police reckon American assault rifl es, look like M16 A2s, maybe M4s. One offi cer thought there was a fi fty-cal in there somewhere, but it’s not confi rmed.’
‘Any licence plates?’
‘Yep - we’ve got all that.’
‘Positive IDs?’ asked Mac. ‘I mean, are we sure it’s them?’
‘Hundred per cent on Samir, eighty per cent on Akbar. No one recognised Hassan - they wouldn’t know who he was, but the police guys said it was a Pakistani crew.’
‘That obvious?’
Freddi smiled. ‘Around here it is. Besides, their military guy already has a nickname and it’s the same as the one we had for him in Kuta.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah, they call him Gorilla. He walks like an ape, you remember the guy?’
Mac nodded as he remembered ducking down in Ari’s car outside the Puri. The last thing he’d seen was that helmet hair on a big wide man with a big wide gait.
‘We’re trying to get a name on him, but we think he’s Hassan’s tough guy. Former Pakistani special forces, something like that.’
Mac thought about it. ‘Any other airfi elds they might use? A Plan B?’
Freddi shook his head, smiled. ‘This is Sumatra, McQueen - we got old airfi elds like we got trees.’
A black LandCruiser was waiting at the airport when they landed and Purni took the wheel. They left Medan behind and swept inland at a hundred and fi fty K an hour, locals pulling off on to the shoulder of the narrow roads as the Cruiser approached.
Freddi sat in the front with a police radio and M
ac sat in the rear, his Oakley pack beside him. He hoped there was a spare assault rifl e in the weapons bags stowed behind him. The thought of a shoot-out with Gorilla’s boys, armed only with the Heckler, was not comforting.
The terrain undulated through lots of green, the heat and the haze giving the country a haunted feel. The radio crackled constantly and Freddi spoke into it while looking at a plastic-covered map on his lap. Occasionally he’d make an entry in a small detective’s notebook, turning around sometimes to confi rm a landmark called from a helo team. Mac didn’t know how you’d fi nd a landmark in that country with its miles of green scrub, palm-oil plantations, market gardens and small farms, punctuated by stands of jungle that looked like they’d been allowed to remain around the creeks and rivers.
A Huey painted in army camo colours buzzed the Cruiser and Freddi looked up through the sunroof at the ID numbers, then yelled something into the radio. The excitement almost reached screaming levels from the radio speakers as Freddi tapped Purni on the left arm and pointed, then tapped him again, Mac’s adrenaline squirting as they screeched into a four-wheel hand-brake stop.
Purni brought the revs up again and gunned the Cruiser into a hard-right turn as they aimed into an impossibly narrow jungle track and fl ew into it like a train into a tunnel. In seconds the bright light of the open Sumatran country was replaced with a darker, dappled drive down a trail close enough for the trees to brush and bang the sides of the Cruiser. Mac reached for his seatbelt as he looked over Purni’s shoulder and saw the speedo nudge one-seventy, the spring-mounted aerials whiplashing around the vehicle.
They screamed through the tunnel of green at breakneck speed, Mac suddenly feeling very seasick. Without warning they were travelling uphill, Purni struggling to keep the Cruiser on the track as it bucked and whined against the rough ground, the overworked engine screaming every time all four wheels got airborne. As the terrain got even steeper Mac grabbed the handrail in the ceiling and heard himself say, Oh shit, as the Cruiser hit the crest of the blind rise at one sixty-fi ve and leapt into the air.
Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike Page 9
