Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent Read online

  Mac was looking at the stowage map that allowed you to click on a position of a container on deck and bring up the details. He called Brown on the radio but there were still no clues out of Manila International.

  Sawtell was searching the quarters and the engine bay and kitchen/

  living areas. Mac doubted they’d fi nd Garrison or Sabaya, or Diane.

  Sabaya’s MO never put him with the stolen containers or the actual crime. Hokkaido Spirit might be carrying a VX bomb without knowing it. In that case there’d still be one or two crew who were in on it.

  Mac clicked on the container locations and the fi les came up with port of loading, manifest, port of destination. Most of the containers originated in Kaohsiung and Yokohama and the main port of destination was Fremantle. Nothing obvious was coming up. Mac stuck to the outside piers of the container stack. If Sabaya was going to do this, he’d try to do a good job and he’d want access to his little bomb factory. The layout of a container ship made it very hard to open up a container at sea. The lashing systems that held the stowage in place were one-inch steel bars that ran across the small ends of the containers, preventing doors being opened.

  The stacks themselves were so closed up that you could barely get a person between them. Mac asked the captain for a heads-up on which containers could be opened. Nagai called over the XO and they conferred. If these people were friends with Sabaya or being threatened by him, they were incredibly relaxed about it. Mac was sure they were wasting their time.

  They showed him the containers that were stowed in such a way that they could be opened at sea: when you looked at a stack of containers so all you could see were the doors, the ones you could open were at ten o’clock and two o’clock. Sabaya would have picked those spots.

  Exhausted, Mac’s brain buzzed, his eyesight was not doing well under the greenish tinge of the ship lighting.

  He keyed the radio mic. ‘Captain Sawtell, you there?’

  ‘Sawtell, copy that.’

  ‘Mate, I’m going out to help Alden. There’s nothing I can do here.’

  ‘Mac, can you support us down here fi rst? We’ve got crew secured in the mess. Over.’

  ‘Haven’t told them what we’re looking for, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’

  Mac took Nagai down with him. Wanted a bloke with authority and good English. Wanted to look at these blokes’ eyes, see the reactions.

  They were lined up, those who’d been sleeping in their underwear, others in pale blue ovies, the default uniform on commercial shipping. Mac looked for the odd man, the stare, the aversion, the wide eyes of the guilty guy, the slits of the liar. He looked for hands too deep in pockets, feet splayed all wrong, hips cocked with the wrong kind of tension.

  But Mac saw only fear. Not all Japanese were sophisticated urbanites, as Westerners were led to believe. What Mac was looking at was a bunch of rural hicks who were just clever enough to know that men in bio-hazards didn’t land on your ship in the middle of the Java Sea unless something was very wrong.

  All the Green Berets had stripped back their hoods and respirators, their glass masks hanging under their chins.

  Mac saw Spikey, and turned to Nagai, said, ‘Captain, could you tell them something for me?’

  When Nagai had fi nished translating, the crew was in an uproar.

  Tears, pictures of children being waved at Nagai. Mac had no Japanese but the general feeling was: Get me the fuck off this fl oating freak show!

  Mac looked for the guilty one. He wasn’t there. The Green Berets held their line, guns shouldered, the crew begging with them. The words weren’t understood, but the eyes pleaded - one working man to another - to take them off this death ship.

  Mac had laid it on pretty thick, describing what nerve agent did, how it killed you and how irreversible it was once it was out of its bottle.

  Sawtell’s men looked at Mac. Sweat dripped off top lips.

  Mac looked at Nagai, said, ‘Thanks, Captain. We’re going to search the decks. Crew seems okay.’

  ‘Did we have to do it like that?’ asked Sawtell as they got to the elevator.

  Mac nodded his head. ‘Only way to do it, mate. If any one of the blokes was in on it, they’d be giving up their own mothers by now.

  No seaman will go along with that caper once they know what they’re sailing on.’

  Mac looked up at the main stack of container boxes. It was like a small building at sea. The ship wallowed and Mac had to distribute his weight not to fall. He saw what Nagai and Tokada had told him: three containers at two o’clock were not closed off by lashing or bracing. He and the others had been on the Hokkaido Spirit for thirty-fi ve minutes. The respirator would be out of air soon.

  There were huge steel ladders stowed lengthwise beside the gantry that ran bow-stern down each side of the container mountain. They were the lashing ladders. Stevedores used sus pended cages to do the lashing in port but at sea the crews used the ladders for emergency work. Mac pointed, rasped through his mouthpiece to Alden. ‘Let’s get a bloke up there.’

  It took three of the Twentieth’s science guys to pick up the ladder and set it where it had to go. Mac and Alden held the feet of the thing which had large neoprene pads on the bottom. They couldn’t quite get the angle they wanted. It stood almost upright and felt incredibly unsafe.

  The soldier made good time for a bloke in a bio-hazard. He was rasping too by the time he got to the top. If it felt unstable at the feet, the top of the ladder must have been swinging like a metronome. Mac didn’t like it, said to Alden, ‘Poor bastard must have wondered why he didn’t bring his life vest rather than the China Syndrome costume.’

  The bloke up the ladder heard that and chuckled. Alden was about to pull him down when something came in on his radio.

  Alden looked out at Mac through the Level-A hood and the glass mask. Held up his hand for quiet.

  ‘Manila International found the orphan box. Should have been on the Golden Serpent.’

  Mac’s heart jumped a little. ‘Where to?’

  ‘Singapore,’ said Alden.

  CHAPTER 31

  The Chinook could cruise at a little under two hundred miles per hour - pretty quick for a lumbering freight donkey, but still about ten mph faster than the smaller Black Hawk. Neither of the aircraft had much more than two hundred miles range in the tank. So the fi rst thing Hatfi eld ordered when they were back over the sides was a fuel stop at Surabaya Naval Base.

  Mac was soaked with sweat, tasting rubber deep in his lungs.

  He stood in line to get de-suited as everyone took turns helping the other guy out of the suits. The other blokes kept on their fi rst layer of protections, the coveralls. This was just the beginning of their day.

  The situation room was going crazy. The brass in Manila and Honolulu screamed over the air phone to get the hell into Singapore.

  Yesterday.

  The screens showed the Golden Serpent alongside a landmass. When Mac asked Don where the ship was, he slumped his face down on his hands. ‘Port of Singapore. Keppel Terminal.’

  Hatfi eld had his BDU jacket off, going ape into his phone.

  ‘I don’t give a shit, you hear me?! I have one hundred and eighty bombs containing nerve agent sitting in a container on that ship!’

  Mac saw a new map on the situation table. It was of the south side of Singapore Island. A steel marker - like a stainless-steel chess piece - sat on an area called Keppel Terminal. It was just a few blocks from Cantonment Road. Straight up the hill were the big residential suburbs of Queenstown and Newton. Behind it were the skyscrapers, the hotels, banks and shipping companies. Keppel was on the doorstep of Singapore city.

  Hatfi eld wasn’t getting through to someone. He was trying to explain that the Twentieth was ninety minutes away at least and the Singapore government had to go to what he called Em-Con -

  Emergency Contingency. His folder said Singapore had one. The bloke on the other end had no idea what Ha
tfi eld was on about.

  The air phone crackled with breathless, panicked American voices followed by laidback Singaporean accents saying, ‘Yeah. Right.

  Uh-huh. Yeah.’

  Brown worked his panels like a piano player. He was kicking something upstairs, but while CINCPAC in Manila had become involved on a joint military level, nothing seemed to be happening.

  ‘I need to speak with the security chief,’ Hatfi eld blared into his phone. ‘Okay, okay, the vice-president of security, whatever. I - I know what time of the goddamn morning it is, thank you very much.

  What? Hatfi eld! General Louis Hatfi eld, United States Army!’

  The atmosphere in the situation room was pandemonium. The Twentieth was a classifi ed operation, reports on their operations didn’t go before house committees, they weren’t picked apart on CNN. Their only mission was to respond to any CBNRE emergency at any time, anywhere in the world. Their budget wasn’t limitless but it was in the same deep-pocket league as Delta Force and the geo-spatial guys. Now they had American VX nerve agent wrapped in American CL-20 and a rogue American spook running it.

  And the whole freak show had sailed into the Port of Singapore, the world’s busiest port.

  Mac felt the revs coming up and the massive surge of turbine exhaust and shrieking of horsepower as the Chinook lifted away from Surabaya Naval Base.

  Hatfi eld barely noticed. He was a dynamo.

  Mac thought about how Sabaya and Garrison had probably lured the tail and, once out of sight of land, got an airlift to the other side of Borneo, RV’ing with Golden Serpent, and leaving the tail nothing but assumptions.

  Mac might have picked it if he hadn’t been so tired. But even then, you had to start with the obvious. You never wanted to get lost in the double-reverse psychology department. That was for theorists and second-guessers, people who wanted a bigger offi ce. Sabaya and Garrison had probably had a couple of insiders on board Golden Serpent and no doubt one of the captain’s kids was hidden away somewhere.

  He wondered what they wanted.

  What they wanted!

  The missing piece.

  ‘Mate, what do they want?’ he asked Don between phone calls.

  Don stared at him. ‘Who?’

  ‘Garrison and Sabaya. Has anyone talked to them?’

  Don shrugged.

  ‘Has MPA spoken with the skipper?’

  Now Hatfi eld was listening too. ‘MPA?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah. Maritime and Port Authority,’ said Mac. ‘Their harbour-control people. The Port Master and operations manager will be there.’

  Hatfi eld leaned down on the phone cradle, hit a speed dial, got back to the person he’d been speaking with. Took a deep breath, said,

  ‘MPA operations. Port Master, please.’

  The situation room stopped and looked at Hatfi eld, who sat down, said, ‘That the Port Master? General Hatfi eld, US Army …’

  Hatfi eld nodded, pulled over the piece of paper. ‘There’s a message for me, huh? Now why am I not surprised about that?’

  The group was about fi fty-fi ve minutes out of Singapore when the ends came together. Mac was not needed. He got out of their way, took a seat, reclined it and tried to get some sleep. Let the boys from the Twentieth and DIA do what they were paid for.

  A mix of MPA emergency response, Singapore Police and Singapore Armed Forces tumbled out of the speaker phone. There was a government guy in there too, somewhere, and the panic was now coming from the Singapore side. The biggest worry seemed to be how to deal with the threat and not close down the port. Port of Singapore’s four huge terminals turned over just under half a million containers every week. It was the busiest port in the world and the island republic’s raison d’etre. No one - especially not a screaming American - shut down the Port of Singapore.

  Hatfi eld put on a pair of half-glasses, looked down at his notes and said, ‘Gentlemen, this is the message from the bridge of Golden Serpent: “Don’t approach the vessel. Don’t fl y over the vessel. Don’t contact the vessel. We will be in contact soon with our demands.”’

  The Singaporean politicians and generals went up as one and Hatfi eld winced away from the speaker phone. Silenced them again.

  ‘The message has been directed to me personally. General Hatfi eld, Twentieth Support Command. Which means they know what we do, they expected our response and they know there’ll be a special forces aspect to how we proceed.’

  A person who Mac thought was the Minister of Defence piped up, ‘Why are they talking to the American army? Why not us?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir, I suspect it’s a control thing,’ said Hatfi eld. ‘But if you think it’s a good idea to step in, then by all means. I’m just reading you the message. Our principal mission is the return of the stolen material and the protection of human life.’

  The Singaporeans kept yelping. Hatfi eld repeated the message, said that was all he had. That the message had come through MPA.

  He was trying to keep the Singaporeans focused on what they could actually do: evacuation plans, general preparedness, emergency services stand-by, logistics, comms. And the big issues: how to inform the shipping community without creating mayhem, and how to evacuate the residents without causing a stampede across the causeways into Malaysia - a stampede that the Malaysians might want to slow.

  The general wanted to know the Singaporean Em-Con. The answers weren’t clear; it sounded like a bunch of offi ce guys blamestorming:

  ‘No, I told you. Remember?’ ‘No, but then I sent you that memo.

  You got that, didn’t you?’

  The army guys and the police had a jurisdictional overlap. The Port Master had the legislative oversight and the MPA emergency and fi re service seemed to wield executive power over the lot of them when it came to hazardous and chemical emergencies.

  There were other things the Singaporeans could be doing, such as stocking up on water and taping their doors and windows if they couldn’t make a run for it, said the general.

  Hatfi eld defaulted back to the basics. ‘Gentlemen. This is what we know: the people who left this message have almost two hundred bombs that contain VX nerve agent. We also believe they are in possession of an experimental explosive material called CL-20. It’s about three times more powerful than C4, and we believe they have in the neighbourhood of twenty cases of it.’

  ‘What could it do?’ asked the Singaporean Police voice on the other end.

  ‘Well, you remember Bali?’ asked Hatfi eld.

  ‘Sure do.’

  ‘Those were homemade potassium chlorate bombs. When detonated, the air around them expanded at about three thousand fi ve hundred feet per second. CL-20 makes the air expand at about forty-fi ve thousand feet per second. It’s more than twelve times as powerful.’

  ‘So what would twenty cases of this stuff do?’ asked someone.

  ‘I’ve only seen it detonated one brick at a time. Experimental stuff. And that was enough to fl atten a small building. And I mean fl atten,’ said Hatfi eld.

  Voices rose on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Each case contains fi ve bricks,’ said Hatfi eld. ‘So you get the idea.’

  The voices started shrilling over one another before one voice dominated. Mac thought he heard him introduce himself as Colonel.

  ‘General, I’m more interested in what’s in the container. Last time I saw any literature on VX, I calculated that two of those American bombs would be enough to fi nish Singapore. How many did you say you had?’

  ‘Well, Colonel, we don’t have them. But if none of the shipment has been touched or removed, there’s one hundred and eighty.’

  The roar went up again.

  Hatfi eld was stressed but calm. ‘Gentlemen, we’ll be landing inside of fi fty minutes. May I suggest the Em-Con be in place and a military or police command be operating when we arrive?’ he said.

  Hatfi eld had just, in the kindest tone, suggested they get their shit together.

  Mac awo
ke from his doze. Don and Hatfi eld stood in front of him; the general’s BDU shirt was back on.

  ‘We’re detouring for Halim. Drop you off. Been good meeting you, Mr McQueen,’ said Hatfi eld, putting out his hand.

  ‘Halim?’ said Mac.

  ‘Yeah,’ smiled Don. ‘This just in.’

  Don threw a printout onto Mac’s lap. It was an order from the CINCPAC offi ces in Manila, and included was the cc’d request from the military attache at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta to render all Australian personnel at earliest convenience.

  Mac smiled. The system worked. At some point it always did.

  Frank used to tell him that.

  Don was enjoying himself. ‘Time to get back to the reservation, huh, tough guy?’

  Mac looked at him. The word ‘reservation’ was meaningful in American intelligence circles. The suggestion was that Mac was rogue.

  Mac winked at the bloke. Don wasn’t going to bed for another three days. Mac knew what that was like. Decided to let it all go.

  ‘Thanks, General. Thanks, Don. It’s been fun. Hope you resolve this whole mess,’ said Mac.

  When the two Americans had left him alone, Mac eased back in the seat. It was over. He’d taken his shot, got Judith Hannah back to the clubhouse. He’d put the loose ends together in what might become one of South-East Asia’s defi ning moments. He’d saved a British spook’s life. He’d killed a man, by mistake. Killed another for good reason. Been put in hock to Cookie B.

  Had his heart broken.

  The Chinook peeled away from the group. He looked to his right through the window, saw the other helos keep tramping for Singers and had a brief fl ap of fear and hope for Sawtell and his boys. He’d found Captain Sawtell a bit robotic and terse in the early days. But they’d forged a friendship of sorts. They’d been on the same side in two gunfi ghts now, and in the world Sawtell inhabited, men didn’t get much closer than that.