Double back am-3

by Mark Abernethy

  Double back

  ( Alan McQueen - 3 )

  Mark Abernethy

  Double back

  Mark Abernethy

  CHAPTER 1

  West Papua, August 1999

  Forty-seven minutes after flying out of Tembagapura, Alan McQueen looked across at the second military helicopter as they descended through the pre-dawn to the vast Lok Kok copper mine. A blond mercenary to his left unbuckled his seatbelt, stood up and aimed a ceiling-mounted machine-gun out the helo’s open door at the lunar despoliation that stretched five kilometres to the rainforest.

  Pik Berger’s voice crackled in Mac’s headset. ‘As we planned it, boys,’ came his clipped South African accent. ‘Red team in the front door – blue team takes the back. I want to be home for breakfast.’

  The other five soldiers chuckled and gave the thumbs-up.

  ‘And you, Mr Jeffries,’ said the muscular Saffa with a wink. ‘You’re with me.’

  His gut churning, Mac nodded, checked his Steyr for load and safety. His infiltration of the Lok Kok mine was supposed to be a covert assignment on behalf of Australia’s SIS, a bit of friendly espionage on a Korean mine that was operating too successfully for the Australian government’s liking. The Korean company had been having problems with OPM, the West Papua movement demanding independence from Jakarta. Mac had been ‘consulting’ to the Koreans under his Don Jeffries cover. However, the mention of Jeffries’ military background had piqued the interest of the Korean management and now he was reluctantly accompanying the mine owners’ mercenaries in dealing with a hostage drama.

  The OPM terrorists had hit during a maintenance furlough for the mine, so only thirty of the usual three thousand employees were involved. During maintenance downtimes, mine security was relaxed, though missing the start-up date on a big mine could cost the company a couple of million dollars a day in lost revenue. So the Koreans were desperate to end the siege, start the maintenance works and get the mine producing again.

  Dropping fast to the red clay of the mine’s car park, the helos’ motors beat like drums in the acoustic bowl. Thirty years ago it had been the peak of a mountain – now the area was a huge open-cut crater.

  As the soldiers poured out of the lead helicopter and ran for the cover of a fleet of mine trucks, Mac saw the second Black Hawk thromp over the nearby admin buildings and tilt in a big bank-and-dive manoeuvre.

  The lead helo took to the air again in a cloud of red dust, the door-gunner poised in his safety harness like a jumpsuited angel of death. Berger spat his commands over the radio and three soldiers surged forth from their hides behind the trucks, covering one another across the open ground towards the admin block. Readying himself for the ‘go’ command, instead Mac felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Berger motioning for him to follow. The pop and spit of automatic rifle fire issued from the admin block as they moved behind the line of giant yellow CAT 797 trucks, Mac sandwiched between Berger and a soldier called LeClerc.

  Reaching the last of the trucks, they edged around the six-metre tyre and watched a row of white demountable living quarters adjacent to the line of trucks. Stopping inches in front of Mac, Berger flicked his eyes upwards in a silent command. Stowing the Steyr across his shoulder blades Mac grabbed the railing of the truck’s built-in ladder and climbed the three-storey vehicle onto the spill apron of the dump tray, then stealthed across it until he was looking down into the windows of the men’s quarters. The sound of helos thwacked and throbbed in the dawn stillness as Mac took a pair of fold-up Leicas from his breast pocket and focused them on the windows below. The demountables were empty – except the one in the middle. Berger’s instincts were correct: the OPM thugs and the hostages were in the living quarters, not the admin block.

  ‘Red Dog, Red Dog,’ keyed Mac into the mouthpiece.

  ‘Go ahead, Red Boy,’ came the reply.

  ‘Got four tangos in demountable number twelve, repeat number twelve.’

  ‘Roger that. Tools?’

  ‘Looks like M16s, a fifty-cal and three tool boxes – RPGs, my guess,’ said Mac, trickles of sweat already rolling down his back as the tropics prepared to switch on the sun.

  ‘Hostages?’ asked Berger.

  Squinting through the mini Leicas, Mac did a quick count. ‘No more than thirty, Red Dog. They’re in the common room – they’re cuffed and taped.’

  A pause opened up as Mac kept vigil with the optics. A long, good-looking Papuan face was looking out at the helos. He wore a white T-shirt printed with the OPM Morning Star flag. To most observers, he was a left-wing troublemaker and terrorist; to Mac he was Kaui – a University of Queensland graduate and one of the best covert operators the Australian government had in this part of the world.

  ‘Fuck,’ mumbled Mac under his breath, realising Kaui intended to play out his role, not turn and run like he’d been asked to do.

  ‘What’s that?’ crackled Berger over the earpiece.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Mac. ‘Spider bite.’

  The radio traffic intensified as Berger corralled his boys, Mac becoming agitated as he realised Berger wasn’t going to follow the usual drill. In these situations the terrorists were generally allowed to articulate their political views before releasing the hostages and escaping into the jungle. That was how it worked in West Papua – the terrorists shut down the mines for a few days, gasbagged about capitalism and imperial hegemony, and then everyone went back to work. But clearly Berger hadn’t read the script.

  ‘Red Boy, Red Boy,’ came Mac’s call sign from Berger.

  ‘Copy, Red Dog.’

  ‘How many can you cover from up there?’

  This definitely wasn’t sounding like a negotiation. ‘Negative, Red Dog – no sight lines.’

  ‘What about covering fire?’

  ‘Negative, Red Dog. My sight lines are to the hostages. Repeat, hostages at the front of the common room.’

  Calling Mac down from the truck, Berger’s voice took on a new tone as he ordered the other soldiers into a gunfight with the OPM terrorists in the admin block. Mac climbed down the outside of the truck, past the eight thousand-litre diesel tank. As he landed in the dirt beside Berger, a soldier came forward with what looked like an aluminium backpack.

  ‘What do they want?’ asked Mac, wanting desperately to steer the situation into a negotiation.

  ‘Didn’t ask,’ mumbled Berger, eyeballing LeClerc.

  ‘Ready, boss,’ came the other Saffa’s voice, and Mac turned to take it in. LeClerc had put the backpack over his shoulders and was wriggling his fingers into asbestos gloves before wrapping his hands around a handle not unlike that of a herbicide spray gun. Mac had been trained on something similar during his days in the Royal Marines Commandos in England. It wasn’t a negotiating tool, unless they planned to set alight the OPM guys before listening to the Marxist rhetoric.

  Turning back to Berger, Mac tried to stay calm as the sun came over the jungle canopy. ‘Bit early for the barbecue, eh mate? We usually leave that for after the chit-chat.’

  Berger’s pale eyes chiselled into him for a fraction too long and then the mercenary commander clicked his fingers and LeClerc moved past Mac, his chromed head now covered in an olive-drab protective helmet and mask.

  ‘What about the hostages?’ tried Mac.

  ‘You Aussies are so soft,’ laughed Berger. ‘My job’s to restart the mine – nothing else, right?’

  ‘Not in Africa now, mate,’ said Mac, as gently as possible.

  ‘A kaffir’s a kaffir, bro, and they’re all cowards about fire, believe me,’ said Berger, inclining his head at LeClerc.

  Flicking the safety on the handgrip, LeClerc stepped forwards. Before he’d gone two steps, Mac pulled his Heckler amp; Koch P
9s handgun from its hip holster and whipped the butt down on Berger’s forehead. Spinning, he dropped the third soldier with a. 45 slug to the face.

  Turning back, Mac caught the look of surprise on LeClerc’s face clearly through the plexiglass faceguard. In slow motion, the flamethrower’s nozzle came up level with Mac as he lurched towards it, throwing the nozzle up and to his left as LeClerc hit the juice. Fire squirted ten metres upwards, setting the huge truck tyre alight as the two men hit the dirt, struggling for control of the flamethrower. The heat blasted Mac’s left hand as he loosened his grip and he threw a right elbow into LeClerc’s faceguard. The plexiglass barely moved and LeClerc let go another squirt of the flamethrower, scorching Mac’s eyebrows as the column of ignited gasoline flew just a foot past his face and into the undercarriage of the truck.

  LeClerc kicked Mac in the solar plexus and brought the flamethrower around. Deflecting the nozzle with his left forearm, Mac threw a knife-hand into the Saffa’s throat and jerked the flamethrower nozzle up under the South African’s chin. They struggled like that for ten seconds, Mac trying to get his fingers into the trigger guard, LeClerc attempting to move the flamethrower from his throat as pieces of burning rubber fell off the truck tyre and landed around them.

  The Saffa was strong and they clinched in the dirt, until Mac spat in his adversary’s faceguard. The Saffa lurched away instinctively, allowing Mac time to dig his finger under the fireproof glove and push his finger down on the trigger. A torrent of fire erupted out of the nozzle, melting LeClerc’s face off his skull.

  Rolling seven or eight times away from the burning, screaming man, Mac grabbed a handful of dirt and quickly rubbed it through his hair like shampoo – paranoia about invisible fire still strong all these years after his time in the Royal Marines. The skin on the left side of his face pulsed agonisingly, but he was still in one piece and not alight.

  Reaching for his Heckler lying on the clay, Mac surveyed the scene, gasping for breath. The radio crackled: one of the soldiers at the admin block giving a sit-rep and asking Berger for orders.

  ‘Hold your positions; hold your fire,’ said Mac in his best Saffa accent.

  In the silence that followed Mac moved forwards, past Berger prone on the ground, as the giant truck became fully engulfed in flame. At the entrance to the demountable quarters, he paused and knocked. After a few seconds, a torrent of Trotskyite campus-babble flew back at him, containing references to neo-colonialism and the Wall Street oligarchy.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, mate,’ panted Mac. ‘It’s me – let me in.’

  The door opened a fraction and Mac pushed through into a dark, air-conditioned boot room.

  Kaui’s face loosened and he lowered his Kalashnikov. ‘Shit, McQueen – who brought the matches?’

  Mac leaned away as Kaui winced at the sight of his throbbing left ear. ‘Nice effect with the eyebrow too, mate,’ he laughed. ‘Who needs two of them anyway?’

  ‘It’s gone to shit, Kaui,’ said Mac, checking the Heckler, a little embarrassed that he’d changed the scenario so dramatically with no Plan B. ‘Need a getaway car.’

  ‘What, we don’t get to hand over the hostages?’

  ‘These guys don’t want to talk,’ said Mac.

  In the next room a window smashed and the rhythmic slapping sound of a. 50-cal machine-gun started up. Moving to the portal window in the door, Mac looked out and saw what OPM’s. 50-cal was hammering at: Berger’s Black Hawk was hovering in from behind the mine trucks, looking for the best vantage point while trying to stay clear of the machine-gun fire.

  Moving to the rear window of the boot room, Kaui checked for soldiers in the lane between the living quarters and the rainforest. ‘So what happened to the mercs?’

  ‘Dropped a few of them,’ Mac mumbled sheepishly.

  ‘A few?’ said Kaui.

  ‘Two or three.’

  ‘Shit!’ the Papuan grinned. ‘Alan McQueen joins la causa.’

  ‘ Merdeka!’ Mac said – Independence! – as the door-gunner from the helo opened up, turning the demountable into Swiss cheese.

  CHAPTER 2

  ‘Got a grenade?’ asked Kaui from his crouched position at the back door as the demountable became a blur of splinters.

  Handing it over, Mac whispered, ‘How many?’

  Kaui indicated two with his fingers. He pulled the pin on the small green canister and simply threw it left around the corner of the door without looking. The babble of panicked men sounded from the rear of the demountable and then the explosion tore through the forest and smashed a window in the quarters.

  Yelling for the other OPM lads, Kaui leaned through the back door and scoped the area with his rifle. The OPM thugs ran through in a crouch, one of them leaking blood from a wound above his left eye. Kaui yelled a command at the taller one – Albert – who led the other two operators out the back door towards the rainforest.

  Dropping to his stomach on the floor as the bullets whistled and slapped, Mac followed Kaui on his elbows into the common room, the walls coming apart in pieces the size of VHS cassettes. Bound and gagged hostages stared at Mac and Kaui from their position near the front windows of the destroyed common room – it had once been the social centre of the mine and was now a mess of smashed glass, ruined TV screens and spilled whisky. Several mine workers were injured where they sat huddled on the floor and Mac could hear moans and tape-muffled screams as the door-gunner stopped shooting.

  ‘They’re coming in,’ said Kaui, slithering to one of the RPG boxes as both mercenary helos advanced. He handed Mac the rocket-propelled grenade launcher, with its big ugly knob of explosive on the tip of the rocket. As the Papuan crawled to the next RPG box, the door-gunners opened up again, making Mac and Kaui dive flat to the floor.

  ‘Time to ride,’ muttered Kaui, giving up on a second RPG.

  Crawling back to Mac, he took the RPG, flipped up the back-sights, hit the safety and rose to a classic kneeling marksman stance, the RPG across his right shoulder, its sights lined up with his cocked head. One of the Korean maintenance engineers sobbed with terror as Kaui rose slowly to the level of the windowsill so he could see the helo. After a split second of mutual recognition between himself and the door-gunner, Kaui squeezed the RPG trigger and the rocket whooshed out of the common room and through the truck flames, leaving a wispy trail of vapour for fifty metres before hitting Berger’s Hawk just behind the engine bulkhead. The twin sounds of the engine depowering and the expanding fireball filled the mine crater, and then pieces of the helo were raining on the demountable roof.

  Mac followed Kaui at a run as a grenade sailed through the air and bounced off the frame of the common-room window onto the claypan outside. They leapt through the back door and kept running into the jungle as the grenade lifted a section of the roof and automatic rifle fire ripped into the building.

  Sprinting across a sand and clay track, through a boggy creek bed, they reached one of the mine’s outlying service buildings. The massive sliding door was open, revealing a two-storey gas-powered turbine that created the electrical power for the Lok Kok mine. Idling in front of the building was a silver Nissan Patrol 4?4, Albert behind the wheel gunning the engine impatiently.

  Kaui jumped into the front passenger seat and they lurched into the rainforest, the Patrol bouncing and screaming for grip on the goat track that passed for a road in West Papua. Beside Mac, the OPM operator with the head wound sagged sideways as he lost consciousness. Kaui fumbled around for the first-aid kit that most mine vehicles carry and found it in the centre console. The fourth Papuan held up his friend and Mac tore open the first-aid pack and went to work on the wound, getting it cleaned out and then patching and bandaging the whole thing. When Mac had finished on the Papuan’s injury, Kaui gestured for his friend to work on Mac’s scorched face, which was hurting like hell. There was a burns lotion in the kit and it stung as the Papuan applied it, then slowly it dulled the pain.

  Taking turns looking out the windows, they tried to find th
e second helo, unable to hear anything above the scream of the Nissan’s engine and the cacophony of birds and monkeys in the rainforest. Mac figured that when the mercs secured the mine site, they’d find the trail of the Patrol and come looking.

  ‘Got a plan?’ asked Mac as water bottles were handed out, the humidity of the tropics now filling the cabin.

  ‘Plan was to annoy the mine owners, make them think that OPM was too costly,’ smiled Kaui. ‘Right, McQueen?’

  ‘Well, it worked with those Brazilians,’ shrugged Mac, sipping at the water. ‘Trust the Koreans to find a bunch of hard-ons like this lot.’

  The four-wheel drive crested a ridge and started into a steep incline down the road connecting the Papuan highlands with the coastal plain. Mac instinctively pulled back into his seat and put his foot on the back of the driver’s seat, the sensation like the downhill section of a rollercoaster.

  The road went down the side of a large spur for what looked like fifteen or twenty k and Mac knew immediately they’d be spotted from the air. Before he could warn Kaui, the second Black Hawk appeared, about a kilometre across the valley, its ‘9V’ registration marking it as a Singapore-registered aircraft.

  ‘Got company,’ muttered Mac, and all heads swivelled to the right side of the Nissan. ‘Options, Kaui?’

  Keeping his eyes on the Hawk’s door-gunner in the opened fuselage, Kaui said something in Papuan to Albert, who replied to his boss then hesitated, glancing at Mac. Mac suspected they’d decided on a plan but were worried about freaking out the Anglo.

  Ordering the driver to pull over under the cover of the forest canopy, Kaui looked mischievous. ‘Got an idea,’ he said, opening his door and sliding off the seat.

  ‘Okay,’ snapped Mac. ‘But none of that wacky Papuan shit, all right?’

  The five of them jogged along the forest floor, the altitude and humidity almost choking Mac’s breath out of him as he struggled to keep up with the Papuans. In his days with the Royal Marines Commandos, he’d ended up doing the SBS swimmer-canoeist course which culminated in a survival run in the Brunei jungle. It had almost killed him, and he had a lasting memory of the way a Malaysian candidate had taken the whole thing in his stride, as if eating snakes and scraping leeches in an environment where you could barely breathe was the most natural thing in the world. Mac felt that now – the Papuans loping along in board shorts, talking with one another, while Mac stumbled along in the Saffa fatigues and military boots. In front of him, Albert and the Papuan who’d dressed his burn each carried a piece of the Patrol’s back seat, though Mac wasn’t totally sure why.