Second Strike am-2

by Mark Abernethy

  Diving for the ground, a child under each arm, Mac felt the air shake as bullets whistled and smashed through the foliage. Male voices yelled in excitement from both sides and then there was the thumpa-thumpa of a. 50-cal started up, turning the rainforest into a mist of splinters.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Mac realised the Hassan attack had come from further south and the closest shooter was maybe thirty metres south of where he was with the kids. It created a greater danger: that Freddi and the Kopassus unit might mistake Mac and the kids for a hostile target. The three of them crawled sideways out of the blizzard of lead, the kids staying amazingly quiet given the terrifying situation. They slid down a dry creek bed, then Mac knelt and looked back. Still no one had made them, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a fl anking shooter hooking around from the north. He wasn’t sure whether to break cover and get the kids to run for it or fi nd a hide and let them sit it out.

  Moving north along the creek bed, Mac found what he was looking for. A large tree had fallen down in the creek bed some years before, and vines had cascaded onto it. Pulling up the vine curtain, Mac kicked away a couple of spiders and helped Merpati and Santo under the tree.

  ‘If you stay here and stay quiet, you should be safe, okay?’ he whispered miming it at the same time. They nodded at him, big dark eyes scared but trusting.

  Letting the vine fall back, Mac jogged back along the creek bed, looking for Freddi and the Kopassus guys.

  The noise of gunfi re had subsided into a tactical exchange of three-shot bursts and the enemy fi re seemed to be coming from just south of where the kids had taunted the macaque. Mac crept slowly in that direction, his M4 shouldered as he looked down its sights.

  Pausing behind a tree, he looked ahead intently for twenty seconds and fi nally saw something through the undergrowth.

  There was a two-man team on a. 50-cal gun, mounted on a tripod: Pakistanis in khaki cams. They sent off a burst and fi re came back, so Mac elbow-crawled to a slight rise which gave him an elevation over the. 50-cal team. He shouldered the M4, brought his eye down to the sights and squeezed two bursts of three-shot. The fi rst burst dropped the gunner and the second burst hit the observer in the chest, making him stagger back on his knees. A third man, standing behind the . 50-cal team, fi red back towards Mac’s position, though he didn’t know exactly where he was shooting. Mac ducked behind the small ridge and then came up to take more shots but the shooter was retreating with a strange running gait.

  Mac stood still, waiting.

  ‘That you, McQueen?’ came Freddi’s voice from a point south of Mac.

  ‘Roger that,’ yelled Mac.

  ‘That’s the last of them, I think,’ called Freddi.

  Mac moved quickly down the small ridge in a crouch and ran towards the runway. Breaking into the open, Mac saw Freddi and the Kopassus soldiers to his left and helos roaring overhead. Sudarto was yelling into the radio, his fi nger in one ear. The Hueys fanned out and the door gunners started their stuff. Two Kopassus bodies sprawled dead behind the building and there were some massive holes in the side of the structure, obviously caused by the. 50-cal.

  Mac stooped over and ran towards Freddi, pointed up at the helos.

  ‘The Hassan team has SAMs, remember?’

  Freddi nodded and gestured to Benni Sudarto, who turned away.

  As he did, there was a boom and a fl ash of orange over the jungle.

  A torrent of pilots yelling blasted from the radio and Sudarto yelled back. More Kopassus guys arrived from the other side of the runway, then formed up for a push through the jungle.

  ‘Hassan’s got a boat at the beach with SAMs on the back,’ said Freddi. ‘Major’s pulling the helos back.’

  ‘No rockets?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Can’t get the range, and there’s fi shing boats out there. Hassan’s people have the big calibre guns too, and the major doesn’t want to lose more helos. Wants them able to track these guys out to sea till we can get some air power in.’

  The helos appeared back over the runway area, forming an observation platform. Sudarto gestured at his sergeant, who gave the orders, then the Indonesian special forces moved back into the jungle at a jog. Mac and Freddi got in behind with the major. The Kopassus soldiers mopped up the remaining three Hassan shooters, taking twenty minutes to reach the beach, where they took their positions behind palm trees and waited for the major.

  When Freddi and Mac got to the beach, the Hassan boat – similar to one they used in Denpasar – was already a mile into the Malacca Strait.

  ‘Any further and they’ll be in Malaysian waters,’ muttered Freddi.

  Down the beach, a charred lump of smoking steel was all that remained of the downed Indonesian Huey. As Kopassus soldiers walked out onto the beach and down to the water, another SAM launched from the rear deck of the Hassan boat, skidding through the air like an airborne shark attack. Crossing them from right to left, the Huey it was aimed at pulled up as the missile fl ew under it.

  Sudarto frantically gestured the radio guy over and yelled something into his mouthpiece. The helos fanned further out. A new voice came on the radio, sounding like an offi ce guy. Sudarto cocked an ear and made a face. Looked straight up at the sky, took a breath.

  ‘Jakarta, telling him, No fi ghters today,’ said Freddi. ‘Not going to risk an incident with the Malaysians.’

  As they watched the Hassan gang make their getaway, Mac heard a squealing sound coming from behind them. Swivelling, he and Freddi saw a white Bombardier Challenger private jet coming in fl aps-up to land on the runway. Sudarto yelled into the radio but it was too late.

  The helos were two miles out to sea and the Bombardier had a top speed of almost four times a Huey. Fifty seconds after disappearing behind the stand of jungle to make its landing, the Bombardier was in the air again, in a steep climb, powering up to full speed. The two Hueys chugged like tractors and were not even over the Kopassus ground position on the beach as the Bombardier vanished into the sun.

  As soldiers jogged to the helo wreck, Mac looked at Major Benni Sudarto’s crestfallen face. No doubt he was contemplating his future.

  He’d been outwitted and outgunned by a foreign crew: ambushed on his own patch and then decoyed into letting the enemy get away. It didn’t look good. Still, Mac had other things to attend to. Hassan and Gorilla might well have passed Merpati and Santo’s hiding place when they’d run to the airfi eld. He had asked those kids to stay put and do it his way, and then he’d run off. If they’d stayed where Mac had left them, they might have been discovered.

  Mac started sprinting, leaving Freddi staring after him in confusion.

  Undergrowth slapping his face, roots tripping him, he stumbled on as fast as he could through the jungle. He found the dry creek bed, fell down it, and in a total babbling panic sprinted up it, muttering to himself please, please, hoping that just because someone was a terrorist and a nuclear broker and a bomber, it didn’t mean they would hurt children.

  He saw the tree and lunged at it, pulling away the vine curtain and looking in. Merpati lay crumpled on the ground, eyes staring at the tree. As Mac went to touch her she turned and, fl inching, shook her head. Mac saw why as he leaned over. She’d been shot in the shoulder and blood had soaked down her right side, leaving her entire arm and upper body in a total mess.

  Mumbling prayers to himself, Mac tried to lift her out but Merpati screamed and fainted. He pulled her into his arms, whipped off his vest and tore off his polo shirt to staunch the bleeding in her upper arm. The whole shoulder was mangled, the bones shattered, her arm hanging by a few tendons. Mac screamed for help, his yells echoing eerily in his own head.

  Merpati was stirred back to consciousness by Mac’s screaming, her lips pale and her eyes sleepy.

  ‘Shit, I’m so sorry,’ he whispered, wiping her brow. ‘Merpati, I’m so sorry.’

  He heard voices and yelled again, hysteria creeping into his voice.

  He felt like a stranger in his own body
.

  ‘Where’s Santo?’ he said to Merpati. ‘Come on, darling, where’s your brother?’

  She shook her head very slightly. ‘They take him, Mr Mac.’

  ‘Take him?! What do you mean, they took him?’

  ‘Take Santo,’ she cried, tears rolling out of her eyes.

  The Kopassus guys ran up.

  ‘Who took Santo?’ Mac asked Merpati. He felt almost at the end of his tether, his voice sounding like it was coming from a tinny transistor radio three miles away.

  Merpati’s bottom lip quivered. ‘Gorilla and tall one, they took Santo,’ she wailed, then fainted again.

  One of the Kopassus troopers tore his medico pack off his webbing, the one behind him radioing with a screaming urgency. Then Freddi jogged up, out of breath, as the soldiers gently dragged the little girl off Mac’s lap, trying to keep her arm in place but not succeeding.

  ‘McQueen, what happened?’ Freddi panted, hands on knees.

  Mac sagged back on the carpet of leaves, close to collapse – guilt and fatigue and stress making his brain feel like it was shutting down.

  ‘Shot the girl, took the boy,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Shit!’ said Freddi.

  Mac nodded. ‘Fucking Purni!’

  CHAPTER 23

  Six years later

  Johnny Hukapa came in hard, leading with a right roundhouse kick at Mac’s left thigh. Mac lifted his left leg slightly and covered up his face, drifting beyond the big Maori’s left hooks. Shifting his weight to the left foot, Mac left-jabbed twice at Johnny’s jaw and followed with a straight right, connecting fl ush with Johnny’s mouth, before skipping away.

  ‘Fuck!’ yelled Johnny through his mouthguard, annoyed at being tagged for the third time. He was slightly bigger than Mac but his strengths were in hand-to-hand combat and ground fi ghting, perfected in the Aussie SAS.

  Watching Johnny’s face and eyes through the headgear, Mac threw out a few lefts and followed with a stamp kick into Johnny’s groin protector. Johnny tucked his chin down and came straight at Mac with a fl urry of punches to the headgear, pushing Mac backwards into the ropes of the Gold Coast PCYC boxing ring. Mac covered up and put in a short uppercut to Johnny’s chin, ducked and bobbed and came up on Johnny’s right, threw a cheeky left hook into the side of Johnny’s face before fading to his left and watching Johnny fall into the ropes where Mac had just been.

  ‘Shit!’ spat Johnny as the timer tinged.

  ***

  After showering, Mac and Johnny walked down Monaco Street towards Gold Coast Highway, the early December sun hot on their backs and heating up their baseball caps. Johnny had been working in Sumatra but when his girlfriend became pregnant and put the hard word on him, the result was marriage and a move back to Australia.

  Now Johnny had a fourteen-month-old son called James, while Mac’s nine-month-old, Rachel, was at home with Jenny.

  ‘So,’ said Mac, trying not to pry, ‘you said no again, huh? Boss’s orders?’

  Johnny shrugged, put a piece of Juicy Fruit in his mouth and offered the pack to Mac. ‘Nah, mate, Arti’s cool. I’m just not ready for that shit again, know what I mean?’

  Mac did know what Johnny meant. The mercenary outfi ts made the work in Iraq and Afghanistan sound great with your basic US$180,000 for a twelve-month contract, plus full medical and a whacking great life insurance policy. But once you were a parent and you’d been out of the action for a few years, it was hard to just switch on your instincts and appetite for that life all over again. Johnny had been approached three times in as many months for his old SAS expertise of infrastructure security. Some of the contracts out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Brunei and even Peru were too good to totally ignore.

  ‘You know how it is, mate,’ said Johnny, who had always made assumptions about Mac’s past, ‘you put yourself in a gunfi ght and you need to be in the zone. I mean, totally in the zone. I went up there now? I’d freak out or maybe I’d have no instincts. Either way, mate, I’d take a bullet and I’m too old for that.’

  Mac listened intently. They were both in their late thirties, fi rst-time dads who had left dangerous professional lives behind them to go straight and forge futures without the physical risk. Mac was lecturing and tutoring two days a week at the University of Sydney. Johnny had a long-term contract with Movie World Studios, bodyguarding visiting actors – a gig whose chief danger was getting shot by the paparazzi.

  But while Johnny found it easy to send the private army guys packing, for the past month Mac had been talking with one of his mentors from the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Mac had realised Tony Davidson, now semi-retired, was trying to enlist him as soon as he played that fi rst voicemail on his mobile phone, but he’d called him back anyway. Davidson was the former director of operations for an ASIS jurisdiction stretching from India to Japan and down to Indonesia. He was the last genuine fi eld guy in the Service to have risen to any prominence. These days all the top jobs went to people who boasted about their time at INSEAD or Harvard rather than what they did to get Imelda to open the secret exit behind the mirror in her shoe-room.

  Davidson wanted Mac back in. The former chief of spies was putting together an ‘outer circle’ of intel professionals to pick up a lot of the fi nance and trade espionage that had been overlooked as Australia focused almost exclusively on counter-terrorism. The result of Canberra’s de-prioritising of economic counter-espionage in favour of following the Yanks was a wholesale infl ux of Chinese money into Indonesia via legitimate-looking and commercial-acting companies backed either by the rich power bases of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff or the Chinese Ministry of State Security, a counterpart of the KGB.

  Mac had been following it vaguely, especially the quite brazen economic infi ltration of East Timor and West Irian by MSS front companies. There was also the fi nancial blandishments being offered by PLA General Staff companies in Aceh province, where they were fl attening Sumatra and putting in palm-oil plantations, the largest the world had ever seen. Palm oil was the best and cheapest feedstock for bio-diesel, an industry the Chinese would basically own in the west Pacifi c within twenty years.

  These were only a few of the issues that Davidson was worried about. There were Russian gangsters on the Gold Coast, Khmer Rouge gangs in regional slavery rackets and the Burmese Junta engaging in quite conspicuous heroin production and distribution.

  They got to Gold Coast Highway and Johnny peeled right to walk towards Mermaid.

  ‘Take it easy, brother,’ said Johnny, slapping a big thumb handshake on Mac, who was heading on to Broadbeach. ‘And next week we’re on the mats, mate. See if you’re so cheeky then.’

  ‘Don’t know, Johnny. It’s me knee, mate – playing up again,’ laughed Mac, hamming a knee injury.

  ‘Monday, one o’clock, bro,’ said Johnny as his crossing light went green. ‘No excuses.’

  Mac groaned. Johnny liked to warm up with a few rounds of Greco-Roman, followed by some Judo forms, followed by a half-hour of sparring. And when Johnny Hukapa sparred, it wasn’t hugging. The PCYC judo room would resound to a strange banging sound as Mac consistently tapped out, unable to deal with the power and technique of the bloke.

  Mac stood and watched Johnny go, his gear bag held at his side in a huge paw. His hair was still thick and in a military cut, and he walked like he was marching to a C-130 for another secret rotation.

  Mac turned to his own crossing, hit the pedestrian button and pondered what Johnny had said about anxiety and instincts: Either way, I’d take a bullet…

  There was nothing wrong with Johnny’s reasoning. But still Mac had decided to say yes to Davidson and was meeting him the following afternoon.

  He felt very nervous. He was back in… and he hadn’t told Jenny yet.

  CHAPTER 24

  Mac and Jenny walked the fi ve blocks north to the Surfers Paradise Surf Club. It was a balmy evening with a light salty breeze coming off the Pacifi c, the setting sun making the ocean look like
a purple carpet.

  The transformation in Jenny once she’d left the stress of her AFP role in Jakarta had been remarkable. They’d been lovers on and off since meeting in Manila seven or eight years before. During a period in ‘05, Mac had been in Sydney while Jen was in Jakarta, and Mac had become besotted with an English girl, Diane. But Diane wasn’t all she pretended to be and Mac had found his way back to his true love, Jen, and since they’d married and had Rachel, Mac had fallen for her all over again. He’d always admired her resilience and toughness in the face of people smugglers and the sex-slavers, but she had the strength to be a wife and mother too.

  At thirty-seven, Jenny could pass for someone ten years younger with her long dark hair and athletic body, and Mac always enjoyed the way she held his hand in public and leaned into him when she spoke.

  They got the stand-up table next to the window overlooking the sea and Mac brought over a couple of Crown Lagers. Tradies and real-estate hawkers sank beers in the sprawling bar while plasma screens carried news about what someone had said to someone else in Canberra. The surf club was a tourist-free zone and drinkers spoke in Queensland mumbles.

  They chit-chatted and then Jenny cornered Mac about getting his will done at the solicitors. Jenny had had one drawn up when she fi rst joined the Feds and had it altered after they got married in ‘07 and again when Rachel was born. She couldn’t understand how someone could get to be almost forty and not have a will.

  ‘You’re a dad, mate,’ she chided gently. ‘Now you get to sit in front of a lawyer, tell her whether it’s burial or cremation.’

  Mac did the yeah, yeah – I’ll do it, and Jenny said that was just as well because she’d already made an appointment to see Sian next Tuesday at ten o’clock.

  Mac groaned. Sian Elliot was a former federal cop who was now in general practice in Southport. As a rule, Mac steered clear of people who asked too many of the right questions.