Golden Serpent am-1

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Roger that… sir,’ replied Wardie. Almost snide.

  The clear-out proceeded without trouble. They RV’d at the top of the dune where Manny had already hogtied Samrazi and bundled him onto the carrier rack of his bike.

  The camp was silent but, looking back, Mac could see fi gures stalking around the north end. He watched as Ward switched frequency.

  Saw him morse something with the manual radio trigger.

  They moved down the dune, packed their stuff, got on their bikes. The adrenaline eased and Mac vomited quietly into the dirt. His overalls were wet down the back. He put on a fi eld jacket and helmet.

  The SAS lads did the same.

  Foxy led them out. Seven minutes later Mac heard the F-111s roar in from RAAF Base Darwin. They stopped their bikes and behind them, over the horizon, the air boiled up twenty or thirty storeys into the sky, fl ashing orange, white, red and then orange again. The ground shook slightly, and the group turned east again for the helo pick-up.

  Samrazi would sing, Mac was sure of that, and the Australian government would own a pile of free HMX that Mac and Manny had buried in the desert.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mac watched the Dean of History and wondered how much of this chat was Davidson’s doing, how much a testament to his own genius.

  The fact that the dean referred to him as being from Foreign Affairs put the odds heavily in favour of it being a gift from Tony Davidson, Mac’s recently retired boss.

  Mac had fl own in from Townsville that morning on an Air Force fl ight after a day sleeping and debriefi ng. Today’s mission: fi nd a solid civilian job, ease himself into the straight world without anyone noticing, and have a legitimate life to offer Diane.

  Going civvie was harder than throwing on a tweed jacket and pulling the degree out of a drawer. It meant decisions about things he hadn’t had to consider before during his adult life. Things like getting a mortgage, selecting a phone company, getting the gas turned on.

  Things you learn by living straight. Things a woman expected from a man if she was going to get even halfway serious with him.

  Mac hadn’t owned a car since university but he’d owned six or seven identities. There was going to be a learning curve.

  He exhaled, made his shoulders go soft.

  The dean loaded a briar pipe. ‘Old habit,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Go for your life,’ said Mac.

  The view from the dean’s offi ce in the old Quadrangle building of the University of Sydney looked over a sloping lawn, across one-hundred-and-fi fty-year-old fi g trees and down on to the city. It felt like a stronghold.

  The dean smiled, pushed a stapled set of papers across the wooden desk. ‘An adjunct position isn’t much. Sort of a contracted attachment.

  But it’ll get you on board and we can take it from there, hmm?’

  Mac wanted to throw himself on the old bastard, weep with appreciation. But he stayed calm. ‘Sounds good to me, Jim.’

  The dean pushed back against his desk with his right foot, put the pipe in his mouth.

  ‘I’ve assigned you to Derek Parmenter,’ said the dean. ‘He can brief you on curriculum before the summer break. You can sit in on a few lectures and you should be fi ne for a February start.’

  Mac had met Parmenter and didn’t like him much. But he’d be lecturing and tutoring postgrad students on Australian foreign policy in South-East Asia. The gig was an ‘institute’ rather than a faculty, and that suited Mac. He couldn’t complain.

  ‘Just look it over, it’s all the basic guff,’ said the dean, nodding at the offer. ‘Then sign it and get it back to me by Monday, okay?’

  Mac grabbed the letter and looked gratefully at the dean, who pretended to puff on his pipe as he gazed out the window. ‘Can’t even smoke a pipe these days,’ he said, smiling at something far away.

  ‘Times have changed, Alan – you know that, don’t you?’

  Mac had been pegged for paramilitary duties almost the minute he joined the Australian Secret Intelligence Service from university. He’d played rugby in Queensland and he guessed that to a desk jockey in Canberra he’d looked the part. He couldn’t recall any huge desire for the military direction.

  So they’d shipped him to the United Kingdom and into the loving arms of the Royal Marines and their infamous commando training in Devon. He was part of an intake of other British and Commonwealth intel recruits sent for a crash course in elite soldiering.

  For seven months he was ‘hardened’ as only the Royal Marines believe a man can be hardened. It was brutal. Straight out of an honours degree in history, suddenly Mac was getting his head shaved in the quartermaster’s yard at Lympstone Barracks. The early days were still a blur. He remembered the fi ghts, the cold, the hunger. He remembered purple-faced men with Geordie accents screaming, ‘You silly-looking cunt.’

  The Marines built you up physically and then taunted you psychologically. The airborne course was a good example. High-altitude, low-opening jumps weren’t that bad if you’d trained properly.

  The killer was the three am test: getting pulled out of a warm bed

  ‘wakey-wakey, hands off snakey’ – to go HALO jumping in the dark.

  Mac went on to the Special Boat Service course, which involved a survival route in the Borneo jungle. The course, known in British military circles simply as ‘Brunei’, entailed hunger, thirst, loneliness, confusion, trench foot, fatigue, malaria, deadly wildlife and madness.

  There were swarms of mosquitoes so aggressive he’d been bitten on the inside of his throat.

  There was one guy Mac particularly remembered: Lane, the Canadian. Though Mac’s height, Lane was a bulging gym bunny and a black belt in something. Lane had never missed an opportunity to behave like a wanker, bringing new meaning to the concept of self-belief.

  In Brunei, Lane’s macho act fell apart in spectacular fashion. On the SBS survival section – the last test in a six-month course – the candidates were placed in four-man teams. Three days into the hike Lane lost it – dehydrated, fatigued, disoriented and completely spooked by the Borneo wildlife that included spiders the size of dinner plates. Lane’s breaking point came when the Malaysian candidate in their team caught a fat snake one afternoon and prepared it as an early dinner. They were so hungry that three of them seized on the snake meat, but not Lane. He was fi nished. The martial artist was in an advanced stage of mental collapse by the time he took a seat by the river and started babbling.

  Mac couldn’t even get him to stand – all the bloke could do was cry.

  Mac fi nished Brunei with a small piece of his psyche gone forever. When the successful candidates were all out of hospital, they were called out to the parade ground in searing tropical heat.

  Five instructors walked the line, ritually roughing the hair of their successful candidates and muttering reluctant praise. Non-violent physical contact was too much for some of the guys.

  Mac kept it tight, looked the chief instructor, Mark ‘Banger’ Jordan, in the eye. He’d completed, and he was out. But he’d be a Royal Marine forever.

  Mac walked down from the university knoll and north-east towards Chinatown. Happy. Sydney in early summer was all jacaranda blossoms and the smell of frangipani buds. He had a letter of offer in his pocket and a lunch date with Diane.

  Diane Ellison had lured him from his single status about six months before. They’d met at an Aussie trade function in Jakarta where he’d introduced himself as Richard Davis, a sales executive from Southern Scholastic Books. It was a lie he hadn’t yet undone.

  Mac had been instantly taken with her. She was beautiful and smart, blue-eyed, blonde, tall and curvy. The daughter of a British diplomat, she worked as an IT maven for a global outfi t. She was based in Sydney but her beat covered Jakarta, Manila, KL and Singapore, and her father let her stay in the British compound when she visited Jakarta.

  They’d hooked up again in Sydney, as Mac had found more reasons to fl y down from Jakkers. Things had become serious. It was
n’t just the sex, which was great, but all the close-in stuff that Mac had kept in a psychological vault for fi fteen years. She laughed hard when something was funny but was razor-sharp with men who tried to talk down to her. She was also witty, especially after a couple of wines.

  Mac really liked that.

  It had turned into love.

  And she had no idea what Mac did for a living.

  That’s where the university job came in. A chance to slip out the back way of his current life and reappear like a regular citizen with regular prospects. The kind of thing civvie women demanded.

  She was worth it, thought Mac, patting the lump in his pocket. As the dean had said, Times have changed.

  As Mac strode past the University of Technology he looked across the six-lane road at a Credit Union building covered in mirror glass.

  He gave it a sideways glance. It was an old habit: use any refl ective surfaces to see who was following. He saw himself and reckoned he didn’t look bad for a thirty-seven-year-old with some hard miles on the clock. But as he turned back to the footpath something caught his attention.

  Mac had once spent a secondment with Shin Bet – Israel’s internal intelligence service – learning the part-art, part-science of psychogenic gait analysis. For eight-hour shifts he strolled in front of one-way glass at Ben-Gurion Airport, sat in front of monitors at Haifa’s central railway station and walked the public concourses of the infamous bus interchange in Jerusalem. Between the Shin Bet offi cers, most of whom were women, and the classes at the academy, Mac learned the psychogenic truth that acting natural is more conspicuous than just being naturally nervous. Things happened to your body when you consciously tried to correct nervousness. You tensed down the front of your pelvis, for example, which resulted in a lifting of the heels as you walked.

  The bloke behind him now had that overacted coolness. Mac reckoned him as twenty-fi ve, Anglo. He was dressed like a student with a red backpack, navy T-shirt and runners. He had a medium build, was six foot and professionally exercised. He looked the part, thought Mac, and the bare head was at least a start since only amateurs wore hats on a tail. They made you a walking, breathing beacon.

  He checked the time: twenty minutes before lunch with Diane.

  Mac looked ahead, saw the pedestrian lights across Harris Street holding on red and a bunch of people waiting for the light to go green across the busy intersection. He slowed, stopped and looked intently in the window of a big university bookstore, keeping his peripheral sight on a circle to his left. He wanted his stalker to pass.

  He didn’t.

  Game on.

  Making as if to move towards the pedestrian crossing, Mac saw the traffi c lights turn to amber. He stopped, turned back to the bookstore, an academic catching sight of something. Then he counted down ten seconds to himself, not looking at the crossing at all. The kid would be getting jumpy, probably also having to feign interest in Windows XP boxes or a book on economics by Samuelson.

  Mac heard the squawking of the green pedestrian signal and waited until he heard it stop. Seven thousand, eight thousand, nine thousand

  …

  He counted it down slowly then stood straight and started towards the crossing. The crowds had crossed and a few people were building up again on the kerb as the light fl ashed red. He had fi fteen metres to make the crossing. He accelerated and made the distance in four strides. Horns sounded and cars edged forward as Mac ran across the four lanes.

  He made the east side of the street and slowed to a walk, panting slightly as he slipped into the cool of a crowded convenience shop.

  At the newspaper rack he turned and waited. He could see the kid across the road, rubber-necking like a tourist worried he wouldn’t see another kangaroo.

  Mac needed to make sure any backup broke cover too. He picked up a banana from a display tray and moved back into the swirl of the shop, positioning himself behind two customers. On the other side of Broadway, a middle-aged tenderfoot had his hands in his pockets, whistling at the sky. Mac thought he knew that face. It was ludicrous.

  He guessed the backup had made him, so the tail would hang back. Mac bought the banana, left the shop and kept walking with the lunch-hour pedestrians along Broadway as it swept around left towards the broad boulevard of George Street. In front of him the panorama of Sydney’s theatre district opened up. Mac was certain that the backup guy would now have stepped in as the main tail. His mind spun with the possibilities. They both looked Aussie. Service? ASIO?

  Two blocks down the slope of George Street Mac came to an old hotel bar on his left, with several identical glass-door entrances spaced about ten metres apart. He sped up, doubling his walking speed through the foot traffi c. As he reached the last glass door on the corner he turned left without stopping and pushed straight through into the pub.

  It was dim inside. No one looked up from the horseracing on the bar TVs as Mac moved through the gloom and a door marked BISTRO. He kept moving through the cool of the air-con, into the pokies parlour, with scores of slot machines whirring. Against the far wall was a glass door that led back onto the street.

  He took off his jacket, put his left arm on the top of a pokie machine and looked at it intently, while keeping an eye on the door under his left armpit. Almost immediately the backup passed the door, stressed and sweating. Perfect.

  Mac was straight out the door and into Mr Backup’s shadow. He was hoping that by removing his jacket he’d lose the tail who was probably behind Backup. Suits not only change your colour – they change your shape.

  Mac blended into the pace of the street and followed Backup, who was dressed in pressed blue jeans, riding boots and a windbreaker

  – way too hot for the weather and a sign that the bloke was probably armed.

  Mac watched him slow, fade to his left at the door Mac had disappeared through forty seconds before. Mac was closing so quickly that by the time Backup moved through the inward-swinging door, Mac was right behind him. He moved into the small of the guy’s back and pushed the banana in hard, steering the portly bloke towards an empty bench table that looked out on the street.

  ‘Keep your hands open and where I can see them, mate,’ he hissed.

  Backup did as he was told.

  ‘And make that a schooner of New, you bludging bastard.’

  Backup hit the table and turned. His fl orid face glowed.

  He smiled.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Macca. Sorry, mate.’

  Rod Scott was an old colleague from the Service who was once expected to rise through the ranks, do a lot of lunching in Jakarta and KL. He was at least ten years older than Mac and had been assigned to the young Alan McQueen during the fi rst Iraq War. And here he was tailing friendlies in Sydney.

  Mac shook his head, threw the banana on the table. ‘Mate, what are you doing in the fi eld?’

  Scott’s face dropped and Mac instantly regretted his cattiness.

  ‘Fuck it, Mac. You want that beer?’

  The door fl ew open. Mac had been waiting for it. The young crew-cut tailer came through in exactly the pose Mac had expected: right hand under his left armpit and into his backpack.

  Scott stepped in. ‘It’s okay, mate,’ he said, holding the youngster’s arm. ‘I’ll see you back at the car in thirty. Right?’

  The youngster slowed his breathing and looked from Mac to Scott as the punters in the pub went back to their racing. He was confused as he made for the door.

  ‘And mate,’ muttered Scott, ‘stay off the air on this, all right?’

  The youngster nodded and left, giving Mac a sneer.

  Mac winked.

  Scott brought two beers back to the stand-up table.

  Mac worried at his watch. ‘Better make it snappy, mate. Only got a couple of minutes.’ The tension had gone out of the air -

  Scott hadn’t been tailing Mac, as such, just having a look at his movements before moving in for a chat.

  Scott’s eyes lost their professional hardness as h
e sipped his beer.

  ‘Sorry about this bullshit, Mac. Tobin’s got something for you. Urgent.

  He wants to talk.’

  Mac felt the bottom fall out of his day. Greg Tobin was the Asia-Pacifi c director at the Service. He headed a territory that spread from New Delhi across to Tokyo and down to Jakarta. Tobin had taken over from Tony Davidson four weeks earlier in what had been one of the most unpopular successions in Service memory. Even in a profession staffed by sneaky little shits, Tobin was the alpha shit. He was the new breed: slick, expensive suits and armed with an MBA. Not high on fi eldwork experience but great at getting promoted. Tobin had not acknowledged Mac’s transition agreement, which meant he might pretend it didn’t exist.

  ‘I’m on the way out, Scotty.’ Mac eyed the beer but decided against it. He didn’t want Diane thinking he was on the piss with the boys.

  ‘Thirtieth of January and I’m gone, right?’

  Scott nodded, not meeting Mac’s eye. ‘Look, mate -‘

  ‘No. You look. I’ve done it all by the book, I’ve done it totally the way Davidson and the department wanted it.’ Mac felt his anger coming up and he breathed deep. He could see Scotty was scared. ‘I’ve even landed a straight job. This Sydney Uni gig is Davidson’s doing.

  Look at me,’ said Mac, holding his arms out, looking down at his charcoal suit and black offi ce shoes.

  Mac realised he’d been yelling slightly and he calmed it. ‘Christ, Scotty, why didn’t someone just call?’

  Mac already knew the answer to that one. Getting into the spy trade was the easy part. Surviving the debriefi ngs, departmental threats and surveillance on your way out was another thing. Intel operatives never really left the life.

  Mac had been where Scotty was now back in ‘02. A fi nancial operative named Kleinwitz had tendered his resignation. The offi cial reason: he’d fallen in love with a local bird during a posting in Manila.

  Problem was, Kleinwitz was simultaneously applying to the Australian Trade Commission. Mac was in Manila at the time and was thrown the debrief.