Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent Read online

  The teapot came back, along with a glass of water. Mac sank the water in one, wincing at the pipe that bulged in his brain.

  ‘So what’s the set-up?’ asked Mac, who was getting his bearings and starting to worry about where Sawtell and his boys were.

  ‘Private work, mate. Contracting, protection, a bit of law and order. You know how it is.’

  Mac had a fair idea how it was. In places like Sulawesi, the foreign miners, loggers and oil companies wanted to be able to work their concession without complication. Mercenaries like Sonny removed the complications. Accountants back at head offi ce called it ‘pacifi cation’.

  Hemi moved to Mac’s nine o’clock and Sonny changed the pace.

  ‘So what brings you up here, mate?’

  ‘Girl,’ said Mac. ‘She went missing from the embassy. Just checking she’s okay.’

  ‘Little out of the way to go missing, eh?’

  Mac was getting his instincts back. He was going to tread very, very carefully. Sonny had said he was mercing. But not for whom.

  ‘Well, she might be up to no good,’ said Mac. ‘Might be nothing.

  They sent me out for a chat. No biggie.’

  Mac reached for his tea. He realised Sonny hadn’t offered him any clothes. He was still in his undies - no Beretta.

  ‘Coming out for a chat with the cavalry, Chalks?’

  Mac looked up and Sonny looked straight back. It was a steady gaze and it gave Mac the creeps.

  ‘Those boys would be, what, Yank special forces?’ asked Sonny.

  ‘Probably came in from Zam, right? Or Guam?’

  Mac looked away.

  ‘What’s she done?’ said Sonny.

  Funny, thought Mac; three days ago he had asked the same question in exactly the same tone. And now here he was in the middle of Sula-fucking-wesi and still none the wiser.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t know?’ Sonny raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Don’t know - on the lam with an American as best I can fi gure it.’

  ‘American, huh?’ Sonny looked quickly at Hemi, looked back.

  ‘Tall cunt? This Yank?’

  Mac nodded.

  ‘About my age? Dark hair?’ asked Sonny.

  ‘That’s the bloke,’ said Mac.

  ‘And?’

  Mac’s training and natural inclination told him to always withhold names and histories. ‘Need to know’ was a well-worn cliche but it saved a lot of complications. Then again, Mac didn’t have many options. He decided to horse-trade. ‘Where’re my boys?’

  ‘They’re safe. But one of them didn’t make it.’

  ‘Which one?’ said Mac, gulping.

  ‘Big cunt. I was about to tap you on the shoulder and he took a shot at me. Hem took care of it.’

  Limo!

  Mac felt a wave of sadness. An American who could drive jungle terrain and not carry on about it. Dead.

  ‘Quick?’ Mac asked. Mac could feel something welling in his chest. He fought it off, kept it tight.

  ‘About fi ve minutes,’ said Sonny. ‘Billy - my helo guy - did all that Catholic shit with him.’

  ‘And the others? They okay?’

  ‘Sure. Got ‘em locked up though. Don’t wanna turn your back on those special forces cunts, eh, Chalks?’

  Mac nodded, dazed. Pointed to his head.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, cuz.’ Sonny chuckled. ‘Got such a fright from your mate that I spun and collected you with the butt. Got you a beauty, eh?’

  Mac nodded.

  Mac had a choice: play the game with Sonny and see where it could lead; or clam-up and try to bluff his way out with threats of government involvement. He wanted to keep his momentum, get Hannah and get out. So Mac spilled on Garrison. Told Sonny just about everything.

  Left out the bit about killing Minky and Minky’s daughter being somewhere with Garrison.

  As it happened, Sonny and his lads had been keeping an eye on Garrison’s people. They were in an area which had been a Japanese mica mine in the 1940s. There were a lot of old buildings and tunnels up there, disused. But Garrison’s people were in a forestry concession, and that’s what Sonny and his mercenaries protected.

  Mac couldn’t read how their chat was going to end. What Sonny might want. Then the former SASer dropped the bomb. Talking about his boss, Sonny used the word ‘Cookie’.

  Mac’s face must have betrayed him.

  ‘What’s up, Chalks? Seen a ghost?’

  ‘You working for Cookie Banderjong?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ snapped Sonny.

  The possibilities started mounting up. With Canberra out of the picture and Mac suspecting a mole, he needed private infrastructure, he needed a guy who could make things happen. But Cookie had to have a reason to help him. Mac decided to give it a burl.

  ‘Does Cookie like stability? Is that what keeps business good?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Sonny.

  The sealed track to the mansion led up the hillside from the military compound. They walked by the helipad, where a white and blue Eurocopter sat on its wheels. There was a hangar behind it and further down the track was a long garage with cammed LandCruisers, the kind with the double rear axles. Mac noticed one of them had a turret in the top with what looked like a US military gun rail. There was a fl eet of motorbikes in there too, orange KTMs.

  Mac was back in his ovies and Hi-Tecs but he still had no gun. He had his G-Shock but the time - 2.34 pm - didn’t compute. It felt like early morning and he still felt like shit.

  ‘So where are we, Sonny?’

  ‘Foothills of Malino. Santigi’s that way.’ Sonny gestured south.

  ‘Nice up here, stays cool in the summer.’

  ‘Sabulu’s a bit far south for Cookie, isn’t it?’ asked Mac.

  Sonny gave him the up and down look. Like Mac was getting cheeky.

  ‘He’s been going south, some power vacuum thing. But you’ve heard all about that, right Mr Spook?’

  Mac hadn’t heard any such thing. The truth was that Indonesian politics were a mystery to all but a circle of about two hundred insiders. In a nation of two hundred and twenty million that was a pretty tight inner circle. Back in the days when Jakarta’s heart was up for grabs and Sukarno thought that ‘non-aligned’ meant not having to deal with the Yanks, the CIA had an entire desk devoted to Indonology.

  The big foreign newspapers still sent in their brightest journalists, the governments rotated in their expert diplomats and the spies trained for a year to get a posting in Jakkers.

  And none of them knew what the fuck was going on.

  Sonny veered towards a demountable building on the road side.

  It was cool inside. A very large Fijian soldier in a black T-shirt and olive fatigue shorts sat at a desk. He leapt up on seeing Sonny, webbing gun rig swinging around as he did.

  ‘How they going, Mosie?’ said Sonny.

  Mac looked to his right, saw Sawtell, Hard-on and Spikey. They were sitting at a table eating lunch behind a steel-mesh cage. They looked over: swollen eyes, split lips. Hate in their eyes. Mac was going to have to work on this.

  ‘Good - no problems,’ the Fijian replied.

  The guy called Mosie looked quickly at Mac.

  ‘Moses, this is Mr McQueen. These are his boys.’

  Mac took his hand. ‘Looking after them, Moses?’

  ‘Yes, Mr McQueen.’

  Mac winked at him. ‘Set, brother.’

  Moses beamed. There were two types of fi eldwork: thuggery and enlistment. You either treated your world as eternally hostile - like the Israelis and Russians - or you cosied up to people and enlisted them.

  Mac preferred the enlistment model.

  Mac moved to the cage. ”Zit going, boys?’

  ‘The fuck you think?!’ said Sawtell.

  ‘You’ll be out soon, Moses has it covered,’ said Mac, trying to keep it light.

  He saw a rack of guns and Cordura bags hanging from the whitewashed wall as he left.
>
  Time to get it sorted.

  Cookie Banderjong was nothing like Mac expected. He had a full head of hair, pushed up and back in a pompadour. A good-looking, round-faced Javanese. The legs outstretched on a huge teak desk revealed a pair of Billabong boardies. His legs were muscled, his chest pushed out against the white polo shirt - the one with the alligator on it. His intel days were over but he was still working out.

  As Sonny and Mac entered he was talking on the phone, wearing a headset plugged straight into his computer. He twirled the headset cable in the air as he yelled at someone in Indonesian. Then it changed to English. ‘Dave, that prick’s got something wrong with his brain. Deadset, you make me come down there and it’ll get ugly.

  Tell him that … okay … yeah … sweet. Sweet as.’

  What stumped Mac was the accent: pure Strine. So it was true, Cookie Banderjong did grow up in Melbourne. You could read all the fi les but you never really got a feel for a person until you heard them.

  Cookie was still into somebody. ‘Yeah, I know, mate. Like I said, either the company starts getting eight-hour shifts - of actual work! -

  out of these blokes or I’ll come down with Mr Makatoa and we’ll have a word in the shell-like.’ He smiled at Mac and Sonny, held his hand up in apology.

  Mac felt expensive Sumatran silk carpet through his socks. They’d been asked to remove their shoes at the tradies’ entrance.

  Cookie signed off: ‘Yeah, yeah, mate. I know. It’s not your fault.

  Time to sort it though, huh? Sweet, no worries, catchya.’

  He squeezed a button on the cable, tore his headset off and chucked it on the desk. Walked around the desk and across the chocolate-coloured carpet in his bare feet. Cookie was about fi ve-nine and athletic. He put out his hand, smiled big like a movie star.

  ‘You must be Alan?’

  ”Zit going?’ said Mac.

  ‘Can’t complain.’

  They shook. Mac smiled back. Couldn’t help himself.

  ‘They call me Mac.’

  ‘Mr Makatoa’s told me a bit about you - sounds interesting.’ Cookie pointed to the white leather sofas by the huge PanaVista window that looked out over the valley.

  So Cookie was an enlister too. He used the correct pronunciation of Sonny’s name. He said it Maka- tor, knowing how irritated Sonny would get hearing the Anglo version of Maka- to-er. In Maori, toa meant warrior, and people with that in their names felt it was there for good reason. Enlisters noticed the small things; Mac decided he’d better be cagey with this guy.

  Cookie’s offi ce was a sprawling thing up on the second storey of the mansion. Around the walls were the mementos of his life in BAKIN, the Suharto-era Indonesian intelligence apparatus which had also had a secret police function. There was a picture of Cookie smiling with an elderly Richard Nixon, both of them in golf clothes.

  A black and white photo of a group of men looking serious, standing around a strategy table. It featured a younger short-back-and-sides Cookie with a man who might have been Alexander Haig.

  Cookie called for tea and came over to the sofa, saw Mac checking the walls.

  ‘So you’re ASIS?’

  Mac didn’t respond. In any other company he’d have done the old then I’d have to kill you. But he wasn’t going to say that to Cookie Banderjong. Not here. Not in front of Sonny.

  ‘You’ll like this one,’ said Cookie, moving to a picture on the wall.

  He took it down and gave it to Mac. It showed two men of similar age talking to one another in what looked like a banquet hall. A Chinese banquet hall. Communist Party dog collars and Liberation Army fruit salad displays fi lled the background. The two men in the foreground were in suits and ties: Cookie animated, the other man sullen but intent. The unmistakable face of Vladimir Putin.

  Mac smiled. ‘Where and when?’

  ‘Beijing, ‘93,’ said Cookie. ‘I went through our surveillance footage with the technical guys after the dinner - as you do - and there was this one. He was such a strange guy: very smart, very intense. He was nothing then, just one of those over-serious Commies with the Russian legation.’

  ‘You guys got a camera into a Chinese state function?’ Mac chortled. ‘Are you fucking nuts?’

  ‘Only when I drink.’

  They shared a laugh. It was funny. But Cookie was also pulling rank, showing Mac that he was hardcore. The real thing - a bloke who could waltz into Beijing and pull counter-surveillance on the MSS, on their own patch.

  Cookie warmed to the story. ‘I saw Putin on the news a few years ago when he became president, and I’m like Holy shit - I know that prick.

  Went back to the old surveillance prints, pulled some strings and got that little beauty on my wall.’

  Mac was being played. He handed back the picture and Cookie gave him the wink.

  The tea came through with the housemaid and kids’ screams echoed through the open door.

  ‘Thanks, Rosie - and tell those kids if I have to come down there I’ll take the damn PlayStation and chuck it in the bin. Okay?’

  Cookie eased back into the sofa. The enlistment was over, his face slackened a bit. ‘What have we got down there, Mac? And what’s in it for me?’

  Mac told Cookie as much as he could about Judith Hannah and Peter Garrison. Mentioned the ambush in Makassar, but not that he thought it was Canberra-connected.

  Cookie squinted at Mac. ‘This Garrison, is that the northern Pakistan Garrison? The police compound guy?’

  Mac nodded. ‘Drugs for guns for gold. A clever guy, good at playing everyone off.’

  ‘That wasn’t a terrorist attack, was it?’ Cookie smiled but with no conviction.

  ‘Nah. Garrison called in an air strike far as we could see.’

  Cookie looked out on the valley. ‘And Garrison’s still Agency?’

  ‘I was briefed three nights ago, and they were claiming him then,’

  said Mac.

  Cookie looked at Sonny. ‘Well this might be a nice coincidence, hey Sonny?’

  Sonny had most of his mercs running cover and clearances for a Malaysian logging company in the Tokala peninsula. At the same time, Cookie seemed to want Garrison shaken down to see where the money trail led. Sonny needed a slightly larger crew for that gig and Cookie wanted Sonny to use the Americans to make up the numbers.

  ‘Works for me,’ said Cookie to Sonny. ‘I want a chat with this Garrison prick, and these guys want the girl. Everyone’s happy.’

  Sonny didn’t like it. ‘Those Yanks aren’t happy, boss. Might have their minds on payback, not on the mission.’

  ‘Your call,’ said Cookie.

  Sonny and the boys had been monitoring the activity up at the old mine, but now that Cookie knew who it was on his turf, he wanted them out of there.

  ‘I’ll have a chat to the Yanks,’ said Sonny, not convinced. ‘See if they’re up for it.’

  Cookie looked at Sonny. Looked at Mac. ‘So let’s do it.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Sonny and Mac walked down from the house in the heat, the cicadas deafening. Sonny suddenly stopped and put a fi nger in Mac’s face.

  ‘Here’s the deal, Chalks. We go and talk to the special forces boys, see if their hearts are in it. Right? But whatever happens, you’re vouching for them. Got it? They’re your problem.’

  Sonny ended this sentence with a poke in the chest. Mac got the point: if Sawtell fucked up, Mac got whacked.

  The lock-up was still cool when they let themselves in. Moses walked out of a door, zipping himself, his SIG handgun in its webbing rig on his chest.

  Sonny didn’t waste time. ‘Hey, Mosie - let ‘em out,’ he said, pulling up the chair behind the desk and sitting down. Moses opened the cell door and positioned himself in front of the confi scated weapons.

  Sawtell stalked out of the cage, looking like he could kill someone with his bare hands. Sonny put his hands up, palms facing Sawtell.

  ‘Time to talk, eh boys?’ When Sonny said ‘boys’ it sounded
like he was saying ‘boice’.

  Sawtell and Sonny talked and talked. They talked about campaigns, about people they’d lost, bullets they’d taken, idiot superiors and the stresses of dealing with friendly fi re in a combat zone. They even realised they’d both been in Somalia at the same time.

  When Limo’s death came up they talked about how much it hurt to tell a bloke’s mum that her boy had bought it, but how important it was to make that call yourself, not let the bureaucracy do it for you.

  Sawtell welled up. Sonny didn’t blink. He said you knew you were in deep when your boys’ welfare meant more to you than your own.

  ‘That’s not weak, John - that’s being a professional. That’s the way it has to be.’

  Sawtell sniffl ed. Wanted to say something but his lip quivered and he stared at the ground. Mac didn’t know where to look. He’d never been in the inner circle of the military when soldiers did this kind of debrief. He’d assumed they just got drunk.

  ‘Tell you something else, John - that boy, the big fella - he was the only one who clocked me,’ said Sonny, his voice respectful. ‘Got a shot off too. Good talent, good lad that one.’

  ‘His name was Alvarez, Christian Alvarez,’ said Hard-on, tears running down his cheeks. ‘We called him Limo ‘cos he was built for comfort not speed.’

  ‘Well he was the fastest of the lot in that clearing, eh boys?’ said Sonny. ‘Billy the fucking Kid. Scared the shit outta me - lost it so bad I almost took Chalkie’s head off!’

  They all chuckled at that one.

  ‘And then what’d we do? One less intel fuckwit to get us in the shit.’ There were wry smiles as Sonny continued. ‘Us simple army boys wouldn’t know how to fuck it up without Chalks here to help us, eh?’

  The soldiers laughed and Sonny ruffl ed Mac’s hair, pretended to try again when Mac leaned away.

  Soldier psychiatry: make it all about the offi ce guy, get the team bonding.

  Sawtell wiped his cheek with the back of his hand. Turned to his lads. Hard-on and Spikey looked like jocks ready to get back in the game. Something passed between the three of them.

  Sawtell looked back to Sonny, said, ‘What’s up?’

  The Green Berets were assigned rooms and had their showers, then ate with Sonny’s skeleton crew in the mess. They ate steaks, mashed spud and then Hemi brought over a plate of steaming corn cobs.