Second Strike am-2
Page 11
There was a light breeze taking the edge off the thirty-seven-degree heat as Mac walked out of the lobby and into the glare, feeling woozy, like he was jet-lagged. He pulled his sunnies down and powered up the Nokias as he walked north through the business district of Medan, a city of 1.5 million, many of whom regarded themselves as Malays rather than Indons. The clean Nokia had no messages but the Service handset did and he dialled in as he checked for eyes, swapped street sides, stopped to look in the abundant mirror glass of Medan’s CBD to check for tails and doubled back on people who happened to be walking behind him. Medan was the Dallas of Indonesia, and as soon as the Black Gold started fl owing, the newly wealthy liked nothing more than a ton of mirrors around the burg.
The message was from Ari: short of breath, panicking and wanting to talk. Mac called him as he found the street mentioned in the Polonia’s brochure as having several rental car yards. Ari’s phone went straight to voicemail, so Mac left a short message with no specifi cs. Just one rotation at the telecoms end of counter-espionage was enough to never again leave a detailed voice mail on a cellular service. It was like nailing your intentions to a lamp-post.
The big-brand rental-car companies were out of four-wheel drives. ‘You should book in advance, at least one week,’ said one of the clerks.
He wasn’t game to hire a people-mover or a sedan given the state of some of the roads in the interior of Sumatra, so he kept walking, down to the Deli River, the largest of three that ran through the city.
There was a riverside coffee shack on a boardwalk and Mac dipped in out of the sun and ordered a coffee. In Indonesia, it didn’t matter what kind of coffee you ordered – latte, espresso, short, long – they’d just bring it black, strong and hot along with a glass of water so you could adjust it to the strength you wanted it.
The shack had both river and side frontage and Mac positioned himself where he could see people approaching from both the boardwalk and the street. The ambush scene on that jungle road was haunting him. Those kinds of set-ups were only dreamed up by people who knew exactly what they were doing and those kind of people were usually special forces. These were serious people, operating with an intel component. If Mac wanted to take the conspiracy theory to its logical extreme, he would conclude there was government-level participation in Hassan’s work.
A middle-aged local woman with a happy round face brought the coffee and Mac ordered three fi sh skewers with a curry sauce.
One of the things that irritated Westerners about Indonesia was the frequency with which restaurants and cafes were all out of certain foods. But Mac liked that, because the Indons only served fi sh from the morning’s catch, and when it was gone, it was gone.
He took a few sips of the coffee and when he was calm he hit redial on the clean Nokia and waited.
Joe picked up on the fourth ring.
‘Can’t talk now,’ whispered Joe. ‘Call back, okay?’ and he hung up.
Putting the clean phone on the table, Mac picked up the Service Nokia and was about to dial when he changed his mind, grabbed the clean Nokia and called KL directory. The call-centre person connected him direct to the George Institute, a government-funded research facility in George Town, Penang.
The George Institute was supposed to do medical-related work on radiological medicine, and sometimes did, but it was better known as a nuclear weapons skunk works that did a lot of contract trials and tests on behalf of the US Department of Defense. Three months after the September 11 attacks, the Bush White House had launched its Nuclear Posture Review, which changed US nuclear policy from
‘pre-emptive nuclear war’ based on incontrovertible evidence to
‘preventative nuclear war’ based on a belief that such a strike might be necessary. The Yanks had started the nuclear arms race again and a lot of countries and companies were making billions from the technology upgrade from the 1980s.
Mac asked for the extension and the phone was picked up on the second ring.
‘Hello, who is this?’ came the slightly paranoid voice Mac remembered from his Ukrainian engineer friend in Iraq.
‘Vikkie!’ yelled Mac. ‘How the hell are ya?’
There was a pause and then Viktor clicked. ‘McQueen! You mad Orssie!’
Mac asked how Vik and his new family were going.
‘Still kicking and screaming,’ announced Vik with confi dence.
When Mac and the Ukrainian engineer both realised they were being moved on from INVO for failure to stick with the lies they were supposed to be telling, they’d had a huge night on the piss after Mac told Viktor that in Australia a sacking had to be endured with a certain vigour. ‘Gotta go out kicking and screaming, right, Vikkie?’
Viktor had never heard that piece of Strine and was fascinated with how it sounded. People who had grown up under the Commies were astounded there was even a term for that kind of defi ance, let alone that it was a proud character trait. It had become part of Vik’s lexicon that night in Basra and Mac smiled to think he was still using it.
After the catch-up chit-chat, Mac got down to business. ‘Mate, I’ve set up a gmail account in the name of that bloke who poked you in the chest that night in the hotel car park. Only I’ve put the names in reverse order, okay?’
Vik listened, focusing in on the Pommie spy who tried to make him change an inspection report one night to ensure that a tractor part was recorded as a centrifuge arm.
‘The password is VIK7979,’ said Mac. ‘Open the fi rst message, and when you’ve read it, delete it, okay Vik?’
‘Sure, McQueen.’
‘And, mate, if you have a computer outside the Institute -‘
‘I get this,’ said Viktor, long enough under the Soviets to know what was going on.
They rang off, with Vik promising to respond within the hour.
The curry fi sh arrived and, as he ate, Mac’s clean Nokia rang.
He took the call and didn’t stuff about. ‘Joe – Akbar’s dead,’ he whispered.
There was a pause, two seconds of dead air.
‘You there?’ asked Mac.
‘Yeah, mate, yeah,’ came Joe’s voice.
‘So, Akbar -‘
‘Yeah, look Macca,’ said Joe, searching for a tone. ‘Yeah – Akbar.’
It was uncharacteristic for Joe to stumble. Before being restreamed into ASIS management and becoming a controller, he’d been a top-notch fi eld guy out of Beijing. Joe was fl uent in Cantonese and Mandarin at a time when Foreign Affairs had Australians who generally only spoke one or the other. He used to joke that, because he grew up in a house with a Calabrian mother and a Roman father, he had to balance peasant Italian with the highfalutin language of the metropole. He saw the same distinction between China’s two main languages – he didn’t see a drama. After Joe got married he’d pulled back a bit and then when the fi rst of his three kids arrived, he asked for a desk job – Wife’s Orders.
‘So, you saw it – I mean Akbar?’ asked Joe.
‘Confi rmed,’ said Mac, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice. ‘Had eyes.’
‘Fuck!’
‘What I said.’
Joe heaved a breath. ‘Who?’
‘One of Hassan’s crew. Shot him in the back rather than let him be taken by the BAIS team.’
‘Jesus!’ Joe spat, a cross between amazed and disgusted.
‘So you know about Hassan?’ asked Mac, trying to get Joe to connect the dots.
‘Yep.’
‘Know he’s one of Doctor Khan’s operators?’
Joe sighed. ‘Look…’ he started, then trailed off.
‘Joe, we’re talking about people who sell enriched uranium.’
‘McQueen -‘
‘Abu Samir is part of the crew. Did you know that, mate? He’s JI, case you were wondering.’
‘Okay, so look -‘ Joe started again.
‘- we’ve got an atomic weapons dealer running around with Jemaah Islamiyah and they’ve already bombed Kuta, killed a carload o
f BAIS guys and assassinated an Osama bagman -‘
‘Macca -‘
‘So what the fuck’s going on?’ snapped Mac.
‘Mate, some people have just joined me, I’ll get back ASAP.’
‘What’s the mission, now?’ asked Mac.
‘Stay put, help BAIS fi nd the other -‘
‘Other?’ asked Mac.
But Joe had hung up.
CHAPTER 16
Mac had a friend in Medan by the name of Johnny Hukapa, who owned a tour company with his father. To the public, the owners of Sunshine Tours were your friendly guides to Lake Toba and Gunung Leuser National Park. To Mac, Johnny Hukapa was a former SAS soldier whose main source of income now came from bodyguarding the gold and gem merchants who made their trips into the subcontinent, Sumatra and Kalimantan to get their materials wholesale. He was conspicuous in Sumatra for his size and presence, but Mac needed to make a quick trip into the hills and Johnny Hukapa had precisely what he needed: highly secure jungle transport.
The bell dinged as Mac walked into Sunshine Tours, located in an old Dutch-built freestanding house set back from the road. The woman behind the counter was a thin, short, middled-aged local with a weathered face and a big genuine smile.
‘Hello, mister,’ she said.
Mac asked for John Hukapa and the woman said, ‘Okay, you come now,’ dragging him by the hand through a curtain of multicoloured plastic ribbons and into an offi ce. A large Maori man in military shorts and a black T-shirt stood up from an armchair and came towards Mac.
‘Macca! Long time, bro!’ said the man with a smile.
‘Johnny – how you going?’ said Mac, shaking the proffered hand.
Mac had met John Hukapa in Iraq in the late 1990s, when Hukapa had been doing clandestine patrols with the Aussie SAS around Iraq’s borders with Jordan. Mac’s assignments were concerned with the Jordan stevedoring and trucking companies and the extent to which they were really Saddam’s corporate fronts. John and Mac had become friends, especially when they worked out that their fathers had been in the Vietnam War together.
John brewed tea and they chatted about the old days. As they relaxed, a very large middle-aged Maori man walked into the offi ce and looked through Mac like he was a pane of glass.
‘Dad, this is Alan McQueen,’ said Johnny.
The big man put his paw out, his eyes steady on Mac’s. ‘You Frank’s boy?’
Mac nodded, shook the man’s hand. ‘Sure am.’
‘Name’s Tom, but my friends call me Huck.’
‘People call me Macca.’
‘So Macca – what’s up?’ asked Tom, as he sat behind his desk.
Mac spelled it out as best he could. There was an old airfi eld somewhere inland from Binjai but before the actual Sumatran highlands.
‘The Palau fi eld,’ said Tom, with a nod. ‘What are we doing up there?’
‘Just having a nosey-poke.’
Tom looked at his son. Johnny raised his eyebrows slightly, and Tom looked back at Mac. ‘So let’s go.’
They got to the airfi eld at half past two, the red Sunshine Tours LandCruiser bursting out of the dimness of a Sumatran jungle track and onto an open space that was almost a mile long. It ran north-south and, as they drove across it towards some dilapidated buildings on the far side, Mac realised they were driving on slabs of concrete.
‘Japs built this in ‘41 and ‘42,’ said Tom. ‘There’re fi elds like this all over Sumatra and Java – they were supposed to form a defence of the new territories. Guess it didn’t work.’
The area was huge and Mac was quietly amazed at such a piece of infrastructure going to waste. ‘So it’s not used – I mean for anything ?’
Tom chuckled. ‘Mate, Sumatra has a pretty basic economy. If you can’t grow rice on it, fi sh in it, or graze livestock on it, then it’s useless, right?’
Mac wasn’t sure what he was looking for but there’d been something odd about the night and morning’s events. The Indonesian military had deterred a plane coming in to exfi ltrate the Hassan-Samir team, but as far as Mac could gauge, the Hassan-Samir team seemed to be doubling back. Maybe they’d left something at the airfi eld, something worth going back for, worth killing for.
They stopped in front of the old buildings and Johnny pulled a couple of M16 assault rifl es from the luggage compartment of the Cruiser. Johnny was a slightly smaller, more athletic version of his father, about six-one, one hundred and ten kilos, very built and yet strangely careful on his feet – the one unifying hallmark of special forces operators.
They started with the main building, a medium-sized Quonset-style hangar. Some of the curved iron roofi ng had fallen in under the weight of vines and creepers over the years, but the frame was intact. Inside, it was fi lled with foliage and clearly no one had been in there for years.
The next building was a two-storey wooden barracks that sagged in the middle. Johnny crouched down at the entrance and inspected it for pressure pads, trip wires, hooks and any other booby traps. There wasn’t much in the barracks either except vines and the smell of bird shit.
They came out into the heat of the afternoon and Mac regretted having worn his civvie clothes. He was already sweating through them heavily.
‘Seeing anything, Mac?’ asked Tom.
Shaking his head, Mac admitted there wasn’t much to see but now he was smelling something. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘Burnt wood,’ said Johnny. ‘This way.’
They walked north along the edges of the runway, the wreck of a once-operational military air base now lost to the jungle. There were water towers, fuel storage tanks, an ablutions block and assorted dilapidated buildings which Mac guessed were the offi cers’ club, air-traffi c control tower and chow sheds. Halfway up the side of the runway, between other rundown structures, was a patch of scorched, still-smoking ground about twenty metres square. It was freshly burned, whatever it had been, and amidst the heat and tendrils of blue smoke Mac caught a distinct whiff of gasoline.
Johnny got them to stand back as he inspected the place for booby traps and IEDs. After giving the ‘clear’ sign, they moved into the area.
Apart from a few struts and beams that were still recognisable, the rest had been burned to the ground. Mac’s mind was going through all the possibilities but he couldn’t think what the Hassan team would fi nd so important that they would risk capture to circle back and do this. The fi re must have been set no more than two hours ago, judging by the smell and lingering heat of it.
‘Want to search it?’ asked Johnny, already scanning.
‘Just looking for anything out of the pattern,’ said Mac.
They fanned out and walked back and forth over the fi re ground.
It was still hot and there was nothing to see. Mac was about to fl ag it away when he saw Tom and Johnny conferring.
‘There’s a steel door in the ashes at the back,’ said Tom, turning to Mac. ‘Might be worth a look.’
Mac and Johnny pulled off their tops and put them on either side of the door that was lying fl at in the ashes, then lifted it away. The door must have been one of the fi rst parts of the building to drop, suggesting it had been on or near the seat of the fi re. It had fallen on some papers, the destruction of which was probably one of the purposes of the blaze. Mac imagined a bunch of soldiers in a rush, not knowing what to take or leave, so they’d just doused the place in petrol and thrown a match on it.
A small pile of A4 sheets had survived the fi re with some blackening. Mac picked up what looked like scientifi c papers: some in Arabic, others in English. It didn’t mean much to him but he rolled them carefully and was about to put them in his back pocket when he saw a handwritten note in blue ballpoint just below the burn-line on one of the pieces of paper.
Mac inspected it: the scrawl looked as if it said N W. He showed the other two. Was it just referring to north-west or did N W mean something special in Sumatra? Johnny and Tom didn’t think so, but said they’d ask around.
They left just after four o’clock and Mac asked how long before they were in cellular range; he wanted to speak with Joe again and Viktor would be calling back.
Moving back into the green tube of the track, Mac felt a little sheepish about coming so far out on a whim for nothing. Johnny drove and his father opened a sports bag, doling out sandwiches and small local oranges that were almost red.
Mac knew from his experience with his own father to steer clear of war-talk with Tom. He and Johnny wanted to know what their fathers had done in Vietnam but Johnny had confi rmed that, like Frank, Tom got annoyed when asked. Very annoyed. So they spoke about the guiding business and the intensity of the industry. When the gold and gem merchants made their buying trips into some very dangerous places they needed hired muscle and Sunshine provided that.
‘You know, these guys are middle-aged dudes, grand-daddies.
They’re totally hard-case,’ laughed Johnny. ‘I thought some of my old regiment mates were tough, but the merchants…’ He whistled low, shaking his head. ‘They trust no one and we’re taking them into places where there is no law. Pakistan’s north-west, Hindu Kush, inland Kalimantan – no places for a jeweller, mate, but they still go, eh Dad?’
Tom grimaced. ‘Yeah, they’re crazy but at least they know where there’s risk. Some of these oil guys we escort around Sumatra have no idea what’s out there; no concept of a teenage bandit who’d kill for a watch.’
Coming around a tight corner, there were two young boys walking on the road, carrying a jungle pig between them. Johnny swerved to avoid them, the LandCruiser slid to the other side of the track and, before he could correct it, the heavy vehicle had dropped into the rocky culvert and come to a smashing halt.