Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike Page 2

  Nowhere for Akbar to hide.

  The second cabin was much the same, but someone was also sleeping on the fl oor, judging by the rolled-up mattress against the wall with a few folded clothes and a book - probably a Koran

  - wrapped in a white crocheted cloth. There were exposed wires and a dangerous-looking jerry-built electrical plug that probably powered a fan when it got really hot.

  Again, no Akbar.

  The sweat rolled off Mac’s forehead as he came back into the cramped passageway, gulping for air, and saw Maddo at the other end. They shrugged at one another, the faint sound of sailors shouting echoing down to them before getting swallowed in the throb of the idling diesels.

  Creeping into the last of his assigned rooms, Mac immediately realised he was in the guest’s cabin. It smelled of aftershave rather than BO, there were a couple of cot beds rather than double bunks and the portholes were open.

  But still no Akbar.

  Mac looked around, opened a wardrobe and found a couple of nice business shirts and a navy blue blazer hanging inside. He was speed-breathing again, an old reaction to nerves that fourteen months in the British military had been unable to beat out of him. Consciously deepening his breathing, Mac brought his Heckler up level with his chest, slowly gripped the door and pulled it back. No Akbar, although there was an expensive leather hold-all on the fl oor. He poked around the edges, trying to see if there were any wires or pressure pads before he opened the thing. It was clean and organised, a bunch of clothes and what looked like diaries. Mac pushed the far side up and found the letters AA stamped into the leather in gold. Ahmed al Akbar clearly liked the good things in life.

  Leaning into the passageway Mac motioned Pharaoh over. Overhead the shouts of the navy boys and the replies of the Princess hands continued. As Pharaoh got to the cabin, Maddo fi nished his search and joined them. Looking down at his G-Shock, Mac realised they were running out of time.

  ‘This is Akbar’s cabin,’ he whispered to Maddo. ‘But he’s not here.’

  Maddo gulped, his square face reddening in the oven-like atmosphere. ‘On deck?’

  ‘Nah - too risky,’ said Mac. ‘He’s down here somewhere. Three minutes, I reckon, then it’s time for Harold.’

  ‘Got that,’ said Maddo. ‘Any ideas?’

  Mac shook his head. ‘You?’

  The three men looked at each other. This wasn’t going well.

  ‘That smell?’ whispered Pharaoh. ‘That aftershave?’

  ‘Aramis, I reckon,’ said Mac.

  Pharaoh jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘I smelled it back here.’

  While Pharaoh led Maddo down the passageway, Mac stayed in Akbar’s cabin. Taking a Ziploc plastic bag out of his rebreather webbing, he pulled out the battered and folded letters he’d prepared at the embassy in Manila and slipped them into Akbar’s main diary in the leather hold-all. Written in Arabic, they purported to be from an assistant attache with the US Embassy in Jakarta, spelling out that should matters prove ‘overwhelmingly diffi cult’ in regards to his cover, his sponsors had an emergency extraction timed for 11 October from Endeh, on the southern side of Flores. All fi nancial arrangements would be honoured in any event, said one of the letters, with funds continuing to be transferred to his nominated accounts in Singapore.

  Though it might seem like an obvious ruse, Mac had set up several numbered accounts at DBS in Singers with the same serials recorded in the letters. He’d even dumped some money in them. Al-Qaeda was a bourgeois organisation, and the fi rst thing they’d authenticate would be the banking details.

  Maddo and Pharaoh stood outside what looked like a cool room or pantry door, with a big cantilevered chrome handle sitting horizontal over the latch and a huge long-shank padlock holding the handle in place. Mac slid around in the sweat that was building inside his rubber slippers as he got to the pantry door.

  ‘Think he’s right, Macca,’ whispered Maddo, pointing at the door.

  ‘Smell that?’

  Mac smelled it immediately. It must have been broiling inside that locked box and the Aramis was wafting off whoever was wearing it like incense.

  ‘Good call, Pharaoh,’ whispered Mac, then asked him to tell Akbar that the Indonesian Navy were boarding and they needed to get him to safety.

  Pharaoh aimed a torrent of Arabic at the pantry door, his tone friendly and fi rm, like a cop. A faint voice came back through the door and they looked at Pharaoh to see what had been said.

  ‘Says, Get me the fuck out of this oven,’ said Pharaoh. ‘Bloke’s ready for Harold.’

  Sizing up the padlock, Mac slapped at a webbing pocket for his lock jiggers, but felt nothing. Fuck! The loggerhead turtle had taken off the webbing pocket with his jiggers and computer code-runners.

  ‘No jiggers, boys,’ whispered Mac, embarrassed. ‘New girlfriend’s got ‘em.’

  Pharaoh put both hands up behind his neck, pulled at the A-frame on his back. Out off the backpack and over his head came the largest set of bolt-cutters Mac had ever seen. They stood as tall as a medium-height girl.

  ‘You taking the piss?’ asked Mac, realising what they were for.

  Maddo shook his head, the sweat pouring down his face. Bringing the bolt-cutters down level, Pharaoh stepped up to the latch. As he did Mac thought he heard something, but no one had noticed. Probably nothing.

  Pharaoh nuzzled the seven-inch jaws of the bolt-cutters up to the thick padlock shanks and jimmied his hands down the levers of the thing to the black rubber handles. Mac couldn’t believe it would work - the padlock looked enormous and was a German brand that special forces usually jigged or blew with a cone-shaped charge of C4.

  Mac’s G-Shock indicated they had one hundred and fi ve seconds till the Indonesian Navy skedaddled. It was getting too fi ne. Then he heard the noise again as Pharaoh braced his legs and torso and got ready to try and clip the padlock. It was the sound of a vibration, something more than the idling diesels in the engine room.

  ‘Shit!’ hissed Mac. ‘They’re pulling out early.’

  He and Maddo held their breaths as they heard the cavitating sound of another set of props increase their thumping against the hull of Penang Princess. It was unmistakable; the TNI Navy vessel was throttling in reverse. They were pulling away.

  ‘Fuck!’ spat Maddo, his hand going to the earpiece of his comms gear. ‘Black Ace, Black Ace. Stand by for extraction,’ he whispered.

  Maddo turned back to the door. ‘Let’s do it, mate,’ he said, nodding at Pharaoh.

  The big man got his elbows in line and squeezed like he was pushing on a Bullworker. The bolt-cutter jaws didn’t make a dent.

  Voices sounded above, coming down a level into the ship. Mac stood back from the door and pointed his Heckler at the passageway while Maddo mouthed encouragement at Pharaoh. ‘Come on, mate - it’s like fucking butter, you’re going through it like butter.’

  There were more thumps and the sounds of excited chatter coming closer. The diesels dropped revs, meaning Penang Princess‘s prop was being engaged, and Mac moved away from the combat divers to get a better line of sight.

  As the chattering voices came lower through the ship, Mac glanced back and saw Pharaoh go for another squeeze, his face puffi ng up with exertion and the handles of the bolt-cutters fl exing slightly as his muscles strained through his wetsuit. He was built like a professional wrestler, but the shank held.

  Human sounds echoed down the iron stairs, now just fi ve metres above. Mac gulped, sweat dripping down his face, praying that whatever checks were being made on Akbar, the sailors would only come down one of the companionways. He didn’t want to die like a rat in a basement.

  Aiming up, he watched a pair of plastic-sandalled feet pause on the top of the companionway stairs - more talking, friendly, expressing relief that the navy didn’t want to board. Mac’s heart thumped in his head and he concentrated on what he could control: his breathing and his aim. Glancing over his shoulder again, he saw Pharaoh’s face turning purple
as he puffed like a weightlifter, spittle fl ying off his white lips, arms rippling like there were champagne bottles moving beneath his wetsuit.

  Finally a tinkling sound rang out as Pharaoh almost collapsed over the bolt-cutters. He’d done it.

  Mac back-pedalled to his navy escort, keeping his eyes on the feet at the head of the companionway. Pharaoh caught his breath while Maddo twisted and removed the padlock from the handle. Then the combat diver pulled a small plastic bag from his webbing and removed a wet rag that quickly fi lled the enclosed space with a smell of solvent.

  As Maddo pulled open the pantry door, Mac and Pharaoh aimed their guns into the dark. Inside, a well-dressed middle-aged Arabic man lay on a bench at hip-height, looking at them with an expression that fl ickered from relief to fear. Maddo moved straight at Akbar, grabbed him by the collar, pulled him back into his stomach and forced the rag over his mouth and nose, the bloke’s little hands scrabbling at the Australian’s arms until the solvent kicked in. They were lucky Akbar hadn’t made a sound.

  Mac pulled the foil out of his webbing, handed it to Pharaoh and moved towards the companionway and those sandalled feet.

  As Pharaoh busted the Xanax caps and poured them into Akbar’s mouth, Mac stealthed beneath the companionway stairs and waited for the feet to move, his lungs and heart going crazy, sweat pouring off his face. The feet shifted and the other person moved away as the feet started coming down the stairs, revealing a mid-twenties Indon sailor in sarung and white singlet. As the bloke hit the passageway and turned down to check on Akbar, Mac brought the Heckler up and shot him behind the ear. It was a very quiet weapon and the sound of the bloke dropping to the old black nylon carpet was greater than the mechanical thump of the round detonating. Mac pulled the body back behind the stairs, the bloke’s ankles still warm in his hands. This was the part of his job he didn’t like.

  He turned to Maddo and Pharaoh, who were moving towards the companionway at the opposite end of the hall. Akbar lay limp over Pharaoh’s shoulder and the big diver had to duck to get both of them under some of the pipes that hung from the ceiling. As Mac moved over to shut the pantry door, his eyes briefl y caught something. He checked again, thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him.

  They burst into the sunlight, panting with the heat and adrenaline.

  Pharaoh was fi rst over the side of Penang Princess, one hand on the railing, the other holding Akbar tight against his chest. Maddo joined him and, leaning over the railing, wrapped the climb-rope around Akbar’s ankles, fl ipped him over and lowered him towards Smithee’s outspread arms. Smithee wound off the ankles and, as the rope swung free, Maddo, Mac and then Pharaoh came down the rope in silence.

  Mac could sense the tension as Smithee pulled the mask over Akbar’s face, the banker coming up from the solvent and immediately trying to struggle. The mask was joined to a standard SCUBA set since you couldn’t put a drugged-up, inexperienced man in a rebreather, unless you wanted him panicking so bad you had to surface. Mac sized up the bloke’s anxiety, which was greater than the fear of simply being snatched. Maybe the bloke wasn’t a swimmer - many Arabs weren’t. Pulling the syringe of pure Valium out of his webbing, he got behind Akbar and jabbed him in the bum with the shortened needle, plunging the entire contents as fast as he could. Akbar yelped slightly, but after ten seconds he stopped struggling and after twenty he was as fl oppy as a doll.

  Smithee strapped Akbar to Maddo’s seat and Maddo kitted up and lay on him. You needed an experienced diver to make sure the snatchee didn’t stop breathing. Pharaoh and Mac put on their rebreathers and gave Maddo the okay through the comms, all of them looking up at the railing, expecting a bunch of faces and a hedgerow of AK-47s to emerge at any minute.

  The whine started and the sled slipped below the surface. Mac felt the warm waters envelop him and was happy for the cover, if not the entrapped feeling of the full face mask.

  The sled got to fi ve metres submerged and they made for the RV.

  Forcing his breathing into the long rhythms needed for the rebreathers, Mac went over the op in his mind. He didn’t like killing another person and usually he had to work hard to keep it from swamping his thoughts. But this time he was preoccupied with something else entirely - he had seen something in that pantry as he shut the door.

  It was a pair of human eyes, staring out of a refi ned Indonesian face.

  Mac didn’t like taking guesses at what he saw and heard, but he was eighty per cent certain he’d locked eyes with Jemaah Islamiyah general Abu Samir.

  CHAPTER 3

  They RV’d with Sosa on a deserted beach two kilometres east of Aimere on the Flores south coast. An old-fashioned BAIS hard-head, Sosa was a short, thickly muscled Javanese, about forty. As Mac unharnessed Akbar from the SCUBA, Sosa waded into the water, soaking his tan chinos to the knee, and beckoned for Akbar to come to him. Still groggy, Akbar hesitated. But when Sosa pulled a black SIG Sauer handgun from beneath his white trop shirt, Akbar slipped over the side of the sled into the tropical water. Sosa grabbed him by the arm and walked him to where a taller Indon waited at the opened rear doors of a white Mercedes van.

  Mac removed his rebreather and strapped it to his seat. The air was wall-to-wall screeching birds, clattering insects and hollering monkeys. Some of the remotest parts of Indonesia were louder than George Street on a Monday morning.

  ‘Thanks, boys,’ said Mac, turning.

  Maddo shook his hand, told him to take it easy.

  When Pharaoh put his paw out, Mac said, ‘Nice work on the padlock, mate.’

  ‘Sweet as,’ Pharaoh said, winking.

  ‘Cheers, Macca,’ Smithee called as he started the outboard. The sled, which had been pumped dry and was an infl atable boat again, turned south and accelerated away across the swell in a blast of two-stroke fumes and small frog-leaps. Mac smiled. Team 4 were a bunch of cowboys. Very dangerous cowboys.

  Mac and Sosa sat in the front seats of the van as they drove west through the Flores countryside with farm vehicles, old Hino trucks and Honda motor scooters. To the left Mac caught glimpses of the sapphire Savu Sea and the green of Sumba Island, which rose out of the water like a croc waiting for prey. On either side of them were market gardens, candlenut orchards and forests. But mostly it was subsistence farms, grandparents with young children tending roadside fruit stalls with three or four items for sale.

  Sosa’s offsider, Charles, sat in the back with Akbar, who was chained to the inside of the van, a blood pressure strap around his bicep and a drip in his forearm. Mac had changed into a black T-shirt and a pair of blue boardies and, letting the adrenaline come down, made small talk with Sosa about politics and the Chinese - the one nationality that united most nations in South-East Asia.

  ‘They change date for their Olympics,’ sneered Sosa, lighting a smoke. ‘Told stupid Anglo it all about weather pattern.’

  A Hino truck came at them, trying to come down the Indonesian

  ‘third lane’, and Sosa pulled onto the dirt shoulder to let it through the middle.

  ‘Oh well, champ,’ said Mac, his heart rate now at normal, ‘maybe all those eights will be lucky for everyone in the region, huh?’

  Sosa wasn’t buying it. The Chinese had held back the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics till the eighth of August - two weeks after the date designated in the IOC’s contract. The new start date of 8.8.08 gave the Chinese three ‘eights’, which augured most auspiciously in feng shui. Most Australians thought it was funny, but other nations in Asia hated that sort of Chinese arrogance.

  Mac swigged from a big bottle of Vittel and felt a sharp pain in his sternum. He had planned two days of R&R on a small island off Flores and then it was back to Manila to do a handover to his replacement before joining the Land of the Long Lunch for the next twelve months.

  Mac had been seconded to United Nations headquarters in New York, where he’d be liaising between New York and Canberra and paying close attention to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty
Organization in Vienna and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacifi c in Bangers. He’d been doing his briefi ngs with diplomats and ASIS operatives at the UN for the past two months, getting to know the people who were fl eecing the ESCAP aid programs, and those at CNTBTO who wanted to shut down Australia’s uranium exports. He had good form for CNTBTO because of former rotations.

  In Mac’s world the UN was a joke for its wastage, corruption and its lack of action on the things it should act on. For spy organisations the UN was a famous point of intelligence leakage. It had become a global grease trap for malcontents and runners-up - politicians who couldn’t keep their pants on, majors who couldn’t become colonels, diplomats lost to the grog and technically excellent bureaucrats without the leadership credentials to take them to the top of a government department. People long on hubris and short on achievement who would vie for Top Dog status in every conversation by proving greater insider knowledge than the next guy. Those people were dangerous to the national interest, which was why the UN and its agencies were overrun with spies posing as UN hacks, listening in as big-noters showed off their knowledge of where the radar arrays were really hidden, which Saddam companies were still operating in California, and how much gold was being stockpiled by a country’s central bank long after the offi cial change to a fl oated currency.

  Mac blocked his concerns about Akbar and Samir by focusing on the UN gig. It was what Mac had been trained for, what he had dreamed of when he joined ASIS from the University of Queensland with an honours degree in history. That is, high-level espionage where you got to wear a suit and not carry a sidearm. Instead, Mac had been earmarked for paramilitary training on entering ASIS and he was sent to the UK to undergo the Royal Marines Commando training at Devon and intel sections at Chicksands. He’d found it a little insulting at the time, since he had an excellent degree, but the suits in Canberra had taken one look at him and seen only a boy from Rockhampton with a footballer’s build.