Double back am-3

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Not ours, McQueen,’ said Jim. ‘Langley once used him as a banking front and a conduit for their black funding, especially around Korea. He created the money-laundering schemes for heroin money through those banks in Macao – remember?’

  Mac nodded. A bunch of North Korean military accounts were found disguised in apparently legitimate banks in Macao.

  ‘When the CIA realised that Wa Dae was putting the North Koreans’ drug money and the Agency’s corporate fronts through the same banking scams, they cut him loose,’ said Jim. ‘So, he was a US intelligence asset, but not now and never DIA.’

  The sat phone trilled on a table by the door. Mac smirked, waiting for Jim to pick it up and hear someone call him ‘Champion’. He wanted to see Jim’s reaction, the reaction of a liar.

  Standing, Jim looked at the ringing sat phone and leaned out his door. ‘Simon – your phone, buddy!’

  Mac watched, stunned, as Simon picked up his sat phone and turned away.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said the DIA analyst, stress in his voice. ‘Um, yeah, so I think… can I just… I’ll call you… and, yeah, so

  …’

  Looking at Jim, Mac said, ‘D20.’

  Turning first to Mac, then to Jim, Simon’s face was a study in guilt as he hung up and folded the aerial.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Jim, furious.

  ‘Umm, I don’t know -’ started the analyst.

  ‘So why’d you answer to Champion?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Look, you don’t know -’ stuttered Simon, the yuppieish know-it-all act crumbling like a sandcastle.

  ‘Answer the question, buddy,’ said Jim, very softly. ‘Why would you answer to Champion?’

  Simon kicked at the carpet, face reddening.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you express surprise when a stranger tells you that another copy of Operasi Boa has turned up?’ asked Mac, feeling the anger well in him.

  Lurching sideways, Simon fumbled in the coat rack and came out with a black Beretta 9mm handgun, which he waved back and forth between them while backing up for the door.

  ‘Don’t try anything,’ he spluttered, nervous but quite steady with the gun.

  ‘I don’t want to try anything,’ said Mac. ‘I came here to get you to reverse the green light on Operasi Boa. You have to stop this madness.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because, buddy,’ said Jim. ‘You can’t go killing civilians just to prove a concept. Is that what you’re involved in, Simon, a clinical trial that got out of hand?’

  ‘Stop!’ Simon yelled at Jim. ‘You never understood, man!’

  ‘Understood what?’ asked Jim, trying to keep his voice calm.

  ‘The importance of the science! What else?!’ he yelled.

  ‘When the science is a disease falling from a chopper, believe me, buddy, I know the importance,’ said Jim.

  ‘Shit, man,’ said Simon, smiling grimly. ‘The Koreans have been hounded for decades because of their Ethno-Bomb research, but you two aren’t scientists, you have no spirit of curiosity, no purity of -’

  ‘Ethno?’ said Mac. ‘What’s -’

  ‘Look at you, Jimbo! You’re just a spook, a spy! You tear everything down to the worst human motivations, but Saddam was trying to build some -’

  ‘Saddam?!’ interrupted Jim, his hands lowering. ‘You little cocksucker – it was you! You got me barred from that team in Iraq!’

  ‘We needed a scientist, Jimbo – UNSCOM did fine without you.’

  ‘You little -’ snarled Jim as he moved at Simon, fists clenched.

  A shot fired and a lump of plasterboard leapt out of the wall behind Jim.

  ‘Don’t get confused, Jimbo,’ said Simon as Jim froze. ‘You might be the tough guy, but I have the gun.’

  The glass of the entry door caved in with an explosion of glass, and Bongo Morales emerged in his tradesman’s overalls, swinging the A4 from his hip. As Mac saw the gun aimed at Jim, he realised Bongo had been prepped to go for the wrong guy.

  ‘No, Bongo,’ yelled Mac, trying to cross in front of Jim.

  In the moment of hesitation, Simon turned and shot at Bongo, the first one missing, the second one hitting him in the throat. The A4 spewed bullets as Bongo keeled over and Mac dived for cover as Jim took a bullet in the thigh from the A4 jammed on full auto. Crawling under the cordite and smoke, Mac made his way into Jim’s open office, gunshots from Simon following him.

  Crawling to Jim’s desk, Mac stood and fumbled manically at the drawers till he found a hip rig hiding beneath a bunch of files.

  Wrenching the Beretta from Jim’s holster, Mac turned and found Jim standing in front of him, Simon’s handgun pushed into the back of his skull.

  ‘Drop it, McQueen,’ said Simon.

  The safe door swung shut, plunging the three of them into darkness. Around Mac, Jim and Bongo, shelves reached to the ceiling, packed with American files, photo satchels and state secrets.

  ‘Reckon we’ve got three or four hours of oxygen in here before it gets grim,’ said Jim, his teeth chattering from the shock of his bullet wound.

  ‘Got a lighter?’ asked Bongo, still holding the bleeding graze on the side of his neck. ‘Left mine in the van.’

  Jim pulled a lighter from his chinos and lit it. Standing, Mac looked around the tiny room, hoping for an air vent or trapdoor in the ceiling that they could use to attract attention. The ceiling of the safe was sealed but Mac noticed a red marker pen attached by string to the shelving. Grabbing a piece of paper from a file, he wrote Help, we’re in here on it and slipped it under the door.

  The lighter grew too hot for Jim’s hand and they went back into darkness, Mac and Bongo tearing up Jim’s chinos to put a bandage on his leg.

  ‘So,’ said Mac, as Bongo tied off the light tourniquet above Jim’s wound, ‘is someone going to tell me what that fruitcake was on about?’

  ‘What part?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Did Simon say Haryono’s program was an “Ethno-Bomb”? What is that?’

  ‘Shit,’ said Jim, as he moved into a better position.

  ‘Well?’ asked Mac in the darkness.

  ‘Okay,’ sighed Jim, reluctant. ‘But I was going to tell you, okay?’

  ‘Okay, Jim – tell.’

  ‘The Ethno-Bomb was probably conceived by the Israelis after the Six-Day War, back in the late sixties,’ said Jim. ‘The IDF wanted an “Ultimate Contingency” – that is, if the Arab states finally got organised and attacked Israel simultaneously, what was the contingency for being overrun?’

  ‘There was an answer to that?’ asked Mac.

  ‘The ultimate contingency is that you destroy yourself to beat your attackers – you burn down your town on top of them. The enemy dies but the price of victory is ashes in your own mouth.’

  ‘So, the Ethno-Bomb?’

  ‘Well, in those days the ultra-right wing of the Israeli military was known as the Haganah. Heard of them?’

  ‘They were the old tough guys from the forties, weren’t they?’ asked Mac. ‘Assassinations and bombings against the Arabs?’

  ‘That’s them. Known to each other as “the Guild”. They were the hard old Russian and Polish Jews who had no time for the intellectual ideas of the German and French settlers. The Haganah was formally disbanded when the IDF was formed, in ’48 or ’49.’

  ‘So the Guild was still around in the late sixties?’

  ‘Small but influential, and they instigated a crazy project where an overrun Israel could trigger bio-weapons in its cities. This theoretical device would kill Arabs but not Jews.’

  ‘You having a lend?’ asked Mac.

  ‘They were nervous times in Israel, paranoia was rife and the ultra-right found the means to give it a shot.’

  ‘And?’ asked Mac.

  ‘The project went nowhere – officially at least. The government of the day wouldn’t buy into it and it’s rumoured the results were embarrassing. Apparently, Arabs and Jews have similar genetics – the Ethno-Bomb would have killed the lot
of them.’

  ‘Enter Lee Wa Dae,’ said Mac.

  ‘Well, enter North Korea in the late 1980s,’ said Jim. ‘Kim Il Sung was ailing, his son Kim Jong Il was a lunatic with an obsession about magic shows, and a bunch of shady scientists – one of them from the Guild’s original project – talked Little Kim into reviving the Ethno-Bomb.’

  ‘Who was this one aimed at?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Easy. Which race would the Kim family annihilate if you gave them a button to push?’

  ‘The Japs, of course,’ said Mac. ‘So what happened to that Ethno-Bomb?’

  ‘Clinton happened. You remember that warming period, five years ago, when Daddy Kim was dying and Jimmy Carter got the North Koreans to shut down the spent-fuel extraction and the uranium enrichment, in exchange for the United States trading with them again?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mac.

  ‘Well the Commies were required to shut down their bio-weapons research at the same time.’

  ‘But they didn’t?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Technically they did. The bio-weapons projects left North Korea, but an enterprising Korean found a country willing to host the Ethno-Bomb program, keep it going, for a nice fee, paid for by heroin money.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ said Mac.

  ‘No, McQueen – the person was Lee Wa Dae, and in Indonesia he found a man who ran spurious research projects to line his own pockets.’

  ‘Ishy Haryono,’ said Mac, painful images from Lombok AgriCorp filling his mind. ‘Why Timor?’ he croaked.

  ‘It’s isolated, it’s poor, it’s run like a medieval fiefdom,’ said Jim. ‘And the Western media doesn’t give a shit about it. It’s the way it seems to go in South-East Asia – you wouldn’t believe some of the wacko shit happening in northern Burma.’

  ‘So what’s the ethnic divide in -’

  Mac trailed off, suddenly recalling that the native Timorese – the Maubere – were Melanesian, unlike the Malay ethnicity of the Javanese.

  ‘Shit,’ he mumbled. ‘Operasi Boa wipes out the Melanesians, but not the rest?’

  ‘Seems to be what they’re working on,’ said Jim. ‘Europeans and Asians get a bad cold from this weaponised SARS, but the Melanesians have no defence. They last two days, tops.’

  CHAPTER 64

  It was some time before the door to the safe swung back, revealing Tommy pointing a gun into the airless room.

  ‘The fuck?’ muttered the burly DIA analyst, before shoving the gun into his waistband and moving to aid Jim.

  ‘Day off?’ asked Mac, forearm shielding his eyes from the glare.

  ‘Dentist,’ said Tommy, helping Jim to his feet.

  They recounted the events to Tommy as the US military doctor dressed Jim’s wound. The bullet had torn a hole but the slug hadn’t stayed in the flesh. Bongo’s wound was more like a nick, and while the doctor strapped bandages around his thick neck, Jim hit the phones.

  ‘You leading a charge?’ asked Mac.

  ‘This has gone on long enough,’ said Jim, rustling a key chain and opening a steel gun cabinet against the wall. ‘I like letting a target run as much as anyone, but DIA’s involvement in this thing has become plain embarrassing.’

  Joining Jim at the gun cabinet, Mac made his case. ‘I want to be part of it, Jim,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve earned it.’

  ‘You think I’d leave you behind, McQueen?’ said Jim, passing a Kevlar vest. ‘We can’t do this with American soldiers, so you’re up.’

  ***

  The unmarked Cessna Citation jet reduced throttle as it approached the island of Alor. Inside, Mac and Jim faced one another while Bongo and Tommy were belted into the facing seats on the other side of the small cabin.

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s affirmative,’ said Jim into his sat phone. ‘No direct actions, sir, you have my word.’

  Hanging up, Jim grimaced. ‘Tommy and I are tasked for retrieval of Simon – nothing else. We can only carry firearms for self-defence.’

  ‘That’s about as useful as a bicycle pump in a hen-house,’ said Mac. ‘Any word on Simon?’

  ‘The guys at Halim say an army Huey took off from Denpasar just after 1500 hours, bound for East Timor. They picked up some radio chatter – an American male talking to an Indonesian. I’m assuming we’re following Simon to Neptune, although it’s hard to tell – he’s dumped his sat phone, which had a beacon in it.’

  ‘Might get there at the same time if he’s humping it in a Huey,’ said Tommy, looking up from the laptop he’d taken from the DIA office. Every Pentagon-issued computer backed up to a central hard drive and Tommy was reviewing Simon’s shadow computer via a satellite broadband link with the Department of Defense in Washington DC.

  ‘What have we got, buddy?’ asked Jim, growing more nervous the closer they got to East Timor.

  ‘I’m searching his sent emails for clues,’ said Tommy. ‘Any ideas for a word search? I’m betting if there’s any correspondence with Lombok or Wa Dae, he’s done it in a rush, done it from a DIA email server, but embedded it in a legitimate email. There’ll be a type of email that has an innocuous first paragraph, followed by the real message.’

  ‘What have you tried?’ asked Jim.

  ‘Mum, birthday, darling, golf, fishing, skiing, shares, mortgage – all the basics…’

  ‘What about you, McQueen?’ said Bongo, who’d filled his own canvas bag of weapons at the DIA offices. ‘You get those special forces of yours to pitch in?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Mac, thinking of the political considerations that meant they had to rush the Blackbird snatch and then disappear from Bobonaro. ‘But I can try.’

  Unbuckling and moving forward in the cabin, Mac powered up the Harris radio that was built into US military aircraft. Shielding the settings from his comrades, he found a frequency on the UHF band, picked up the chunky handset and keyed the mic.

  ‘Six-Three, 63 – this is Albion, copy?’

  Waiting, Mac could envisage Robbo’s crew trying to stealth up to a militia or a Kopassus troop, and getting his annoying message.

  ‘Six-Three, 63 – this is Albion, are you copying, over?’

  A faint sound of static hissed from the earpiece and Mac was about to contact the navy’s Shoal Bay comms centre in Darwin when a familiar Aussie voice crackled into Mac’s ear.

  ‘Albion, Albion this is 63 – please confirm ID, over.’

  The cheeky bastard, thought Mac. ‘Six-Three – bullriders from Narrabri wear skirts, confirm, over.’

  ‘ID confirmed. And you’ll keep, Albion,’ growled Robbo. ‘You’ll fucking keep.’

  ‘Six-Three, we might need fire support at Neptune, can do?’

  ‘Negative, Albion – currently Mars-bound and covert, over.’

  ‘Understand, 63 – good luck, over.’

  Sitting back in his seat, Mac buckled up as they swooped onto the tiny island that lay between Dili and Flores. As they depowered on the plantation runway, Mac looked out his window and saw an unmarked Black Hawk being refuelled beside a red Quonset building.

  The Citation’s co-pilot unlatched the door and they all unbuckled.

  ‘What about MIT10?’ said Jim suddenly.

  ‘Shit, that’s right,’ said Tommy, fingers flashing on the keyboard. ‘He had that golf shirt with the logo -’

  ‘MIT10?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tommy. ‘It’s an MIT alumni association.’

  ‘For people who can’t get over how smart they are,’ said Jim.

  ‘Eureka! Nice work, boss,’ said Tommy, turning the laptop and letting Jim see.

  ‘Fuck me,’ muttered Jim as the Citation’s foldout stairs hit the tarmac. ‘He was setting this up under our noses. Look at this one – sent four days ago.’

  ‘Probably after you briefed me,’ said Mac. ‘Anything we can use?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Jim, swapping a look with Tommy. ‘If I’m not mistaken, we have the bank numbers and the agreements here.’

  Tapping through the MIT1
0 emails, Jim’s face lightened.

  ‘Simon is running a trust account containing forty million US dollars,’ said Jim, thoughtful. ‘From the wording of the emails, I’d say Haryono can see it but Simon controls it – Simon’s been holding it out there as bait, as a carrot to get the project finished.’

  ‘If we can access it, we could have some fun,’ said Mac.

  ‘We’d need somewhere to push it,’ said Tommy.

  ‘Here’s the sick part, guys,’ said Jim, pointing at the screen. ‘Haryono is getting a bonus of ten million to spray the SARS over the populated areas of Bobonaro, Oecussi, Ainaro and Cova Lima, and then he gets a bonus of thirty million if the UN declares at least ninety per cent of the Maubere population of those regencies dead within three days of the spraying.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Bongo, disgusted.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Mac, trying to stay calm. ‘We have to get Haryono and Kopassus to shut this down – we need the Indonesians to do this themselves, to turn on Simon and the Koreans.’

  ‘By using the money?’ asked Bongo, smiling.

  ‘You’re reading me, brother,’ said Mac.

  ‘Let’s hear it,’ said Jim.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac, getting it straight in his own mind. ‘But first, Bongo has to call his mate Joao and hope he has his sat phone switched on.’

  Lugging the gun bags across the tarmac, the four of them clambered into the Black Hawk as the humidity and fumes swirled around them.

  ‘Neptune’s hot,’ said Jim to Mac and Bongo, taking his seat and yelling over the engines. ‘But it’s where we’ll find Haryono – we’ll deplane in the adjacent valley, hike back over. Copy?’

  Mac and Bongo nodded.

  ‘Last chance for anyone to get off,’ said Jim as the loadmaster slid home the side door and the revs came up. ‘All I can offer is a damaged career and a lifelong feud with Kopassus. But it might be fun.’

  ‘Never much liked Indonesia anyhow,’ said Bongo, staring out of his wraparound sunnies.

  Smiling and giving thumbs-up, Mac resigned himself to a course of action that owed more to the heart than the mind. He crossed himself briefly, watched Bongo do the same, and then the Hawk was climbing into the clear skies above Alor and their hands were reaching into the gun bags.