Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent

by Mark Abernethy

  Sonny’s eyes went wide as hands reached from everywhere. Corn was a favoured military food if you could get it. It made you feel full and had a slow-burn energy effect.

  ‘Hey, McQueen. This reminds me of that time in the desert.

  Remember?’ said Sonny. ‘In the Yanks’ mess? Tell ‘em the story.’

  Mac had hoped Sonny wouldn’t want to relive that episode. He batted it away. ‘Some other time, eh Sonny? Let’s talk Garrison.’

  ‘Easy,’ said Sonny. ‘You get the girl, Hemi grabs Garrison, then we pick up Limo on the way back. Sounds like a plan.’ He pointed his cob at Mac. Sly smile. ‘Shit, Chalkie’s embarrassed. A blushing Australian.

  Who would have thought.’

  Mac put his cob down, leaned back, looked at the ceiling. Yes, he was embarrassed.

  ‘It was a long time ago, Sonny - I thought I was doing the right thing,’ he said. He could feel a constellation of dark eyes in brown faces staring at him. He felt like an iridescent son of Saxony. He looked back at Sonny.

  ‘I’m not a racist, okay?!’

  There was a pause. Then they all laughed. Mac put his face in his hands, moaned slightly. He was still very tired, lump on his head the size of a lemon.

  Hard-on grabbed Spikey by the arm, made a high-pitched nasal mimic. ‘ I’m not a racist, okay?’

  The hard men of the military shrieked like a bunch of girls. Hemi had to hold on to the kitchen bench, like he was having a seizure.

  Sonny cried with laughter. Moses, who was sitting beside Mac, patted him on the back. Smiled a very big Fijian smile.

  Mac let them go. He watched a joke go down that he was excluded from. Forever.

  He fi nally held up his hands. ‘Okay, Sonny, I’ll tell the fucking story.’

  ‘See this corn?’ He looked at Hard-on and then Sawtell as they caught their breath. ‘They don’t serve it like this in the ANZAC chow tents. If you’re Aussie and Kiwi, they pour loose frozen corn kernels out of white plastic bags, boil it till you can’t taste it and then expect people to eat it.’

  ‘Yuk,’ said Spikey. ‘Why don’t they just get the cobs in?’

  ‘That’s what Sonny here reckoned. It was the end of the fi rst Gulf War, there were two days till the airlift, and this madman here,’ Mac pointed at Sonny, ‘had heard that the Yanks served fresh corn cobs. So he invited himself to eat in the US Army NCOs’ mess.’

  ‘This in Basra?’ asked Sawtell.

  ‘Yep.’

  Hard-on whistled low.

  ‘They put up with him for a few days - the Yanks were getting ready to pull out and they were feeding a lot of people. I think they were being polite.’

  ‘Sounds like us,’ said Sawtell.

  ‘I was seconded with Army MI for a few days and I was sitting in the NCO mess one afternoon. I had a pass.’

  The lads ooo ed.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mac, ‘in walks Sonny with a couple of his SAS lads.

  And the bloke - what’s he called, the steward?’

  ‘Yeah, the mess steward,’ said Sawtell.

  ‘He intercepts Sonny and tries to tell him that lunch is off. Sorry, but that’s the rules.’

  ‘No dice?’ asked Sawtell. He laughed, shook his head like hard case!

  ‘But Sonny has already seen the corn, sitting there in the bain-marie,’ Mac continued. ‘And the cook seems okay to have it eaten, so the steward shrugs it off. But on the way to the bain-marie Sonny goes past this Army bloke.’

  ‘US Army?’ asked Sawtell.

  Mac nodded. ‘They let you wear T-shirts in the American messes, and this bloke had a very short-sleeved T-shirt on, and he had these tattoos down his arms. He was a skinny, blond guy. You’d call him a peckerhead, or a, a pecker …’ Mac searched for the word.

  ‘Peckerwood,’ said Spikey.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Mac. ‘Peckerwood - Southern accent, and on one of his arms he had a Confederate fl ag.’

  Hard-on whistled low again, turned to look at Sonny. So did Sawtell. Sonny shrugged.

  ‘So Sonny stops. But he doesn’t worry about the bloke’s fl ag, ‘cos on the other arm he’s got a Maori design.’

  ‘Moko, Chalks,’ said Sonny. ‘Fucking moko. Get it right.’

  ‘Sonny goes “Nice ink you got there, Chalkie - perhaps you’d like to fi ll me in on its history?” And the Peckerwood doesn’t have a fucking clue who this guy is or what he just said.’

  The table laughed, egging Mac on.

  ‘So Sonny says, “The tat, Chalks. The fucking tat - that’s my family you’ve got on your fucking arm.” And this Peckerwood is getting frazzled. Tries to shoo Sonny away.’

  Sawtell was loving this. ‘Bad idea, huh?’

  ‘Terrible fucking idea. Sonny does that Maori thing, looks him up and down like he can’t believe that such stupidity and ugliness exist in the same body - it just can’t be physically possible.’

  Hard-on and Spikey high-fi ved.

  ‘The steward is coming over, people are putting down their cutlery.

  It’s a bad scene because most of the people in the mess are black and Hispanic. They’re tuning in and they’re in no hurry to poleaxe Sonny Makatoa.’

  The Americans swapped glances.

  ‘So Peckerwood tells the steward “It’s okay” and says to Sonny,

  “Why the fuck would I have your family on my arm?” like he wouldn’t sink so low. And Sonny points at the tattoo and says, “‘Cos you’re wearing a something-or-other moko.”’

  ‘Ngati Tuwharetoa,’ said Sonny. ‘The tribe is Ngati Tuwharetoa.’

  Mac continued. ‘The guy doesn’t know what the hell is going on.

  And then Sonny says: “If you don’t know whose family you’re putting on your body, Chalks, then don’t fucking put it on. Understand that, boy?”’

  Sawtell laughed. ‘“Chalks” and “boy” in the same sentence - bet he never got that in Tupelo.’

  ‘So Peckerwood leaps up,’ said Mac, ‘and Sonny just looks him up and down. Doesn’t move. Just leans further in. Peckerwood is clenching his fi sts and Sonny is ready for him. They were about to get into it.’

  ‘Yeah, so?’ said Hard-on.

  ‘So I stopped it,’ said Mac, looking at Sonny. ‘Got between them.

  I shielded the Peckerwood.’

  Hard-on slid his hands over his stubbly head, exasperated. ‘Oh, man. You stopped it? Why?!’

  Sonny stared at Mac.

  ”Cos that’s how I reacted,’ said Mac.

  The good humour defl ated. Mac looked down at his plate, said,

  ‘The guy was ignorant, had no idea what someone like Sonny could do to him.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to hurt him - just wanted to know about the tat,’

  said Sonny.

  ‘You were going to take him apart.’

  Sonny chuckled, then went serious. ‘You got it wrong, Chalks.

  The motto of the story is this: you don’t spend a week under a soldier’s protection and then side against him in a slap-up.’

  Mac looked at the lads, who nodded sagely.

  ‘Not how it works, cuz.’

  The helo swooped in to the landing zone a little after four pm. Sonny had wanted to go while there was still wind around in the tops and the noise of an aircraft wouldn’t drift. They landed downwind from the area they were targeting as an extra precaution. The bloke called Billy de-powered and the thing came to a silent stop.

  They piled out in an assortment of clothing: the Green Berets in their fatigues, Mac still in his overalls and black baseball cap, Sonny’s boys - four of them in total - all wearing the olive and blacks they’d had in camp. The new addition was the fi eld radio with throat mics.

  They were wired again and Mac could see the Americans were more comfortable with it.

  Sonny pulled them in, spelled it out: no heroics, no rock stars. He wanted to turn the thing around real quick without anyone getting shot. If that meant Garrison’s blokes just threw down their weapons, all for the be
tter.

  He wanted to pull the classic special forces trick: attack at about three am with maximum force and see if the enemy had the ticker for it.

  Mac had one proviso on that: he’d rather take one guy - Sawtell or Hard-on - into the structure and try to snatch the girl. He’d want to do it while there was a diversion elsewhere.

  Sonny gave him the okay. ‘But pick your target well. Once the shit starts there’s going to be fi re everywhere. Once it starts I can’t guarantee the girl.’

  They started out and made good time across bad terrain. There was a moon and the lads were fi t. This was a lightning raid and everything they needed they carried on their webbing. M16 A2s and M4 carbines sat across their chests. Hemi hauled a heavy calibre machine gun and Mac had a borrowed SIG 9 mm handgun, with a customised suppressor that he stashed in a webbing pocket. It wasn’t as good as the Heckler but it was better than nothing.

  Mac was still woozy and he struggled to keep up. He was also worried about his wrist. It was still puffed and he couldn’t get his hand properly around the SIG’s grip. But he kept that to himself.

  Hemi walked point and Hard-on swept from the back. It was steep, and dark where the branches hung low; roots tripped them.

  But there was little noise from the party.

  Sawtell hung back a bit and Mac slowed to walk with him. There was something on his mind, something he had to clear before any shooting started.

  ‘John, can we talk?’ he said in a rasping whisper.

  Sawtell looked at him. Mac saw a cammed face and the whites of Sawtell’s eyes.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ah, the girl - Judith Hannah,’ said Mac.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘There’s another one, I think.’

  ‘Another girl? With Garrison?’

  ‘Yeah. Kidnapped.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Remember I told you about Minky?’

  ‘The CIA guy?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, he’s dead.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One guess.’

  They stopped, Sawtell looked away, put his hands on his hips.

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Yeah - not good.’

  ‘You shot him?’

  ‘I was ambushed. I got scared, carried away.’

  ‘And this girl?’

  ‘His daughter.’

  ‘Minky’s daughter?’

  Mac nodded. The entire thing was a less than ideal situation and one that he had been hoping would go away. But here they were, about to storm a compound, and a young girl was in there somewhere. It didn’t seem fair not to warn the soldiers.

  ‘You thought maybe some of us might like to know this? Shit, McQueen, how old is she?’

  ‘Dunno - eight or nine.’

  Sawtell bit his bottom lip. He looked angry. Real angry.

  Mac tried to dilute it. ‘Look, I didn’t want to tell you guys in Ralla

  ‘cos I was embarrassed, and I was hoping I’d be able to get her when I snatched Hannah. And then we ran into Sonny and, well, you’ve seen what he’s like with me.’

  Sawtell nodded. ‘Yeah, I saw that.’

  ‘So, whaddya reckon?’

  ‘You’d better tell Sonny is what I reckon, ‘cos if you put a young girl’s life on his conscience it might be you he comes after.’

  ‘Reckon?’

  ‘I don’t think he’d wear that shit.’ Sawtell almost spat it. ‘And I don’t have a problem with that either.’

  They eyeballed one another. They were strong words: if the girl got hurt, Sawtell would stand back and let Sonny whack the culprit.

  Soldiers were a whole different breed.

  Mac thought about his next words very carefully. ‘It’s just that I don’t want to get Sonny distracted with the racial stuff just before we do this thing.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t he be distracted by that? You focus everything on the cute white girl and a little brown girl can go to hell?’

  Mac swallowed hard. This wasn’t going the way he wanted it.

  ‘That it, McQueen? You know that if a bunch of black and brown men know there’s a little brown girl up there, they might just give her equal priority?’

  ‘Look, John -‘

  ‘So you get the black man to make peace with the angry brown man?’

  ‘Umm …’

  ‘Five minutes before go?’

  Sawtell was looking at him like he was a different species. ‘What is it with you intel guys?’

  ‘John, it’s not like -‘

  ‘Fuck you, McQueen.’ He hissed it. ‘I’ll tell Sonny. We’ll do what we have to do. But fuck you.’

  Sawtell moved off, shaking his head.

  Silence in Mac’s head. Like a drum.

  CHAPTER 12

  Mac lay on the ridge, behind a log under a low-hanging canopy of branches. Hard-on lay beside him. Below them was a compound of eight oldish wooden buildings, like pre-war public schoolhouses.

  A generator drove a fl oodlight system that illuminated a courtyard.

  The place had been built with little evidence of permanence and the main buildings were arranged in no particular order or angle, except that they surrounded the courtyard.

  Thirty metres up a scree and clay slope Mac could see why the compound had been built: there was a mine entry with a small railway coming out of it. During the Second World War the Japanese had exploited the mine for mica, the prime ingredient in silica gels.

  They took turns with Hard-on’s binos, looking for the main residence and a lock-up - diffi cult given that the buildings looked so similar to one another.

  Mac had to think it through: he was either going to stealth into the right building, or he was going to stealth into the wrong building and start a shooting match.

  There wasn’t one girl, there were two. What if they weren’t in the same area? Mac would bet they were. This was hardly a prison set-up and criminals were usually lazy when it came to managing incarceration.

  His mate Jenny Toohey from the AFP once told him about a raid she’d led on a child sex-slave ring in Semarang. They stealthed in to fi nd the boys and girls watching TV in their pyjamas while the kidnappers slept off an opium bender.

  So Mac was going to take a calculated gamble. All he needed was a good odds-on pick on which building the girls were in. He didn’t want to be wandering in and out of barracks at three in the morning, saying, ‘Sorry, fellas, wrong building.’

  According to Sonny’s local intel, there were ten or twelve people in the camp. A dozen was doable.

  The fi rst part of the exercise was sacking the perimeter security.

  Sonny and Hemi had taken that job. There were two guards, as far as they could tell, and Mac wanted them both totally out of the picture before he wandered across that fl oodlit courtyard.

  The radio system crackled. Hemi’s voice: ‘Blue team this is Red.

  Good to go. On your signal.’

  The sentries were down. A good start.

  The plan now was old and simple: Mac and Hard-on would break into their building and search as far as they could without starting the shit. If they couldn’t go further, and needed a distraction or cover, they’d call in the Red team, who would come in with a lot more noise from the other side of the compound. The way these things worked, when they worked well, was highly effective. The louder distraction usually triggered the human instinct to protect; the enemy would hopefully race out of the place leaving the intruders and the abductees inside and unaccompanied.

  Or, it could all go to shit. Like when the distraction didn’t work, or you trod on a cat or someone was simply lying awake, helping himself to a bit of self-love in the dark. That’s when it was close-range gunfi re, which made even professionals rethink their career. It was scary, and someone usually died.

  When Mac did these things, he liked to work with a military athlete, and with Hard-on he’d got lucky - a good operator with soft feet, a calm brain and a killer’s body. Someone who kept their head stil
l and their heart rate down.

  He liked special forces blokes because they thrived under pressure.

  That was something the intel guy needed when he was trying to think things through. Like when you get to a cell and there’s no one in there. Or there’s someone in the cell, but they’re hostile - don’t want to go anywhere.

  Hard-on and Mac mumbled to one another. They settled on the larger of the buildings as the most likely residential. It had a large three painted on it in black, faded but still visible. They could make out a clearly worn path through the clay courtyard to the steps which went up into the building. They couldn’t see similar paths to the other buildings.

  Sawtell agreed over the earpiece, told them he could see a cable from the generator room going into building three, but not going anywhere else.

  The last thing they looked for was a security system. With two perimeter guards, Mac doubted it. Not out in the highlands of Sulawesi. But they did the grid-scans with the binos: started with the foreground, worked to and fro. Moved to the next grid, to and fro. They each did it once over, looking for small white plastic boxes mounted on the wall of a building or on a stick, hip-high to a man.

  Nothing.

  They checked each other. Mac had the SIG 9 mm. The silencer wasn’t the best but it might give him a slight edge. SIGs had the fi fteen-round mags which Mac hated. On a job like this, however, it was welcome.

  Hard-on had his Beretta in his webbing and an M4 carbine lying in front of him. But he was going in with a Ka-bar as his primary weapon. Also in his webbing was a sealed plastic bag fi lled with a length of muslin soaked in the US military version of chloroform. If Garrison was inside, Mac had some questions for him and he didn’t want the bloke dead. There was also the issue of female hysteria: a woman being woken in the early hours by one bloke in overalls and another in a black ski mask might not think she was being rescued.

  Hard-on pulled black gloves over his fi sts. Clenched them. He pulled a black ski mask from inside his shirt, put it on.

  Mac rubbed his right wrist against his face, hoping it would hold out. He could have sat back and let the soldiers do their thing, used his wrist as an excuse. But Judith Hannah was his responsibility, his mission.