Alan McQueen - 01 - Golden Serpent Read online

  They’re reading off a sheet Sabaya gave them …’

  ‘McQueen, this is Hatfi eld. Twentieth. I’ve been listening to your account.’

  ‘Sir, I need you to promise me that when I fi nish the briefi ng, no one comes aboard until we can shut down the media. Please, these guys are beside themselves. You know what Sabaya’s like with hostages.’

  ‘I can’t promise that, McQueen. VX is at a level that takes us to algorithms. You understand what I’m saying, right, son?’

  Mac understood. When you got to the higher echelons of CBNRE

  you had a set of algorithms that you had to work to. The lives of the three people related to Golden Serpent‘s offi cers would be netted off against the potential harm of a mass VX device being detonated to aerosol over the city-state of Singapore.

  So Hatfi eld wasn’t about to promise anything to anyone.

  Mac felt sick but he had no choice. If Hatfi eld was mentioning algorithms, at some point they were all going to have to confront the old argument known as Greater Good.

  ‘General, there’s no tangos on this ship. And the list of demands these guys are reading from runs through to eighteen hundred hours.

  We’ve got till chow to fi nd it, disarm it.’

  Mac had barely got it out before the yelling started up and down the US Army party line. It was like a room full of dead clocks had started ticking. He heard Hatfi eld muttering a list of orders at his people. He was going so fast that Mac could only pick up snippets of information.

  Mac cut into the din. ‘General, please shut down the media fi rst.

  I mean, before you bring the bomb teams on board. These guys have family being held hostage.’

  Hatfi eld couldn’t disguise his relief. He had roughly four hours to dismantle a nerve gas threat - and he had a tango-free environment in which to do it.

  Hatfi eld had taken the information and done what good generals do. He’d made a decision.

  Paul came down from the bridge having asked Wylie to open the gangway doors. Mac didn’t want to go up there and look at those blokes after he’d promised them the kids and wife would be fi ne.

  Paul sat, gave Mac a look. Mac knew what he wanted. ‘What?’

  ‘What?’ said Paul, cocking an eyebrow.

  Paul wanted to rescue the hostages, Mac just knew it.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, mate, I’m not Rambo,’ said Mac, looking away. He was so tired.

  Paul laughed. ‘Come on, Tiger. Let’s give it one last roll. See if we can’t bag these cunts.’

  Outside Mac saw the gangways being dragged by tractors to the side of Golden Serpent. SWAT teams, fi re fi ghters and lots of US Army were milling on the dock clad in either white, yellow or green bio-hazard suits. There were helos in the air, the clanking sound of Black Hawks, the throb of Apaches.

  ‘Okay,’ said Mac. ‘So we have one Moro terrorist and one CIA black sheep. They have a fi ve-hour head start. Where do you want to begin?’

  ‘Back on Brani you told me you might have an idea about that,’

  said Paul.

  Mac thought about it. ‘We’ll need Weenie. We’ll need a helo.’

  Paul slapped Mac on the shoulder. ‘That’s more like it.’

  Mac rose, almost lost his balance.

  Mac slipped up to the bridge to have a word before the Yanks and Singaporeans came aboard and threw everyone into a three-day debrief.

  He leaned in the door, silently beckoned to Wylie.

  Wylie saw it in Mac’s eyes immediately. ‘We’re still on air, aren’t we?’

  ‘Mate, as soon as I told them there was a timeline on this thing, they moved in. Couldn’t stop it,’ said Mac. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Wylie clenched his fi st, looked at the fl oor. ‘Fuck it! You promised us. You both promised us. We’ve done everything your way.’ His bottom lip trembled.

  ‘We’re going after them now,’ said Mac. ‘No promises, but we’re going to try.’

  ‘Really?’

  Mac nodded. ‘I’ll need photos of Jeremy’s kids and your wife.

  Need names, nicknames, cell phone numbers. Anything that could help us.’

  Wylie went into the bridge, came back with Jeremy. They emptied their wallets of pictures. Jeremy had two dark-haired daughters, about fi ve and seven.

  ‘The younger one’s Rachel,’ said Jeremy. ‘The older one’s Fiona, but she answers to Feef.’

  Mac wrote it on the back of the pic. Pulled out Wylie’s wife: slim, attractive, well dressed. A sort of 1980s blonde hairstyle with big Farrah fl icks down the side.

  ‘Her name’s Karen. She’s amazingly calm in a crisis. She’ll do what you ask her,’ said Wylie.

  Mac saw Jeremy’s hands going to his face, freaking out. Ignoring it, he brought it back to Wylie.

  ‘Tell me more about what they were doing. They drop any hints about where they were going?’

  ‘They didn’t kill everyone. They took Irvine, one of my offi cers.

  Someone belted him in the face and one of the guys in charge - the Filipino - said something like, “Don’t damage the goods, I don’t want him useless for the next leg.” I thought it was a strange thing to say

  - the next leg - like it was a tour or something.’

  ‘Irvine?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Yes, Peter Irvine. Canadian. Highly experienced in these waters.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Not that I can recall.’

  ‘How did they leave the ship?’

  ‘By tender. Rigid infl atable thing. Might have been from Brani Terminal.’

  ‘Which way did they go?’

  Wylie pointed over the port side, across the channel to Brani Island.

  Mac nodded. ‘Three of them, huh?’

  Jeremy leapt in. ‘And the woman helming the tender makes four.’

  ‘Sorry?’ said Mac.

  ‘The woman,’ said Jeremy. ‘I went out on the deck when they left, had a look. There was a blonde woman driving the tender.’

  Mac’s ears fi lled with blood, heart pumping behind his eyeballs.

  ‘Woman?’

  ‘Yeah. Mid thirties, very attractive professional type. Couldn’t work out what she was doing with these scum.’

  ‘How was she dressed, mate?’

  ‘Jeans and a shirt. Pale-blue polo shirt thing.’

  Jeremy moved closer, as if something had occurred to him.

  ‘Umm.’

  ‘What else, mate? Could be important,’ said Mac.

  ‘Nothing really. It’s nothing.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Well, she looked up and saw me watching.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And didn’t tell the blokes.’

  CHAPTER 39

  Mac and Paul came off the gangway, onto the quay, holding newspapers over their faces to stop any unfriendlies identifying them on TV. Don and his sidekick from the Chinook swooped on them and another pair of men in bio-hazards walked past them towards Wylie and Jeremy.

  They made straight for Hatfi eld’s Chinook and sat in the aft freight area. Hatfi eld’s voice boomed clearly through the bulkhead.

  Don thanked Mac and Paul for the work, and Paul asked if he could use the Chinook’s radio-telephone. He called Weenie and requested the Gazelle.

  Mac briefed Don. ‘Mate, you can get this to your guys: the container’s at twelve eleven eight six. It’s about halfway between deckhouse and bow, on our side - starboard - and it’s high up. The eighty-six position is two or three from the top of the stack.’

  Don touched his throat mic. Relayed the information exactly.

  ‘Was anyone exposed?’ asked Don.

  Mac shook his head. ‘Not that we know of.’

  ‘Did these guys remove any of the VX?’

  ‘Couldn’t tell you, mate,’ said Mac.

  Don mulled it over. ‘Where are Garrison and Sabaya now?’

  ‘We’ve got an idea. Might need some of your special forces,’

  said Paul.

/>   Don looked sideways at Paul. Clocked the muscles, the broken nose, the steady eyes. Looked back at Mac. ‘Worked with Sawtell’s unit before?’

  Mac nodded. ‘Good outfi t.’

  ‘They’re not needed here. But we’d like a chat with the thieves.

  Understand?’

  Mac nodded at that. ‘We get access to the comms stuff?’

  ‘Depends what it is, McQueen, you know that.’

  ‘How about a lock on a satellite phone?’

  ‘Can do.’

  ‘What do you need, Don?’

  ‘I need Garrison and Sabaya. Can do?’

  ‘We’ll try.’

  They swept south-east at one hundred and seventy miles per hour, Gazelle in the lead, US Army Black Hawk taking the sweep. Mac and Paul spoke with Sawtell over the radio system as they headed for Jakarta.

  Sawtell wasn’t buying it. ‘I don’t get this - must be some mistake, Mac.’

  ‘You saw the lock. It came from your guys,’ said Mac.

  When they’d been jogging across Brani Island that morning, Mac had wondered if the bank account number he’d retrieved from Mister Turquoise in Makassar wasn’t in fact a sat phone number. A sat phone belonging to Garrison. Back at the EOC Mac had phoned the number stored in his Nokia - just given it a blip - and that had been long enough for Brown to get a lock on it from space.

  Mac had the coordinates of the phone on a sheet on his lap. They pointed to a part of north Jakarta, near the port and Soekarno-Hatta airport. It was home to warehouses, industrial parks and huge freight forwarding depots.

  Sawtell crackled in again. ‘Why would they head back to Jakarta?

  What’s there?’

  Paul cut over. ‘Could be where they’re hiding the hostages.’

  Paul was now running the op. Whatever he’d been in a previous life, he sure knew his stuff on the basics of hostage rescue, what people like Mac called a snatch. Paul had also made sure POLRI were in the loop. The British had a liaison bloke clearing the way and the Indons were offering backup.

  Sawtell and Paul had decided that the way to approach the Garrison clubhouse was from the Java Sea end of Jakarta, coming in via the reservoirs, water retention tanks and canals that criss-cross that part of the city. Staying low would keep them hidden and would confuse any noise.

  They’d picked a spot, a wooded area on the banks of a large reservoir. The reservoir was joined to the sea by a canal. About ten blocks south of the wooded area was the last lock on Garrison’s position: a warehouse complex.

  Mac looked at the map on his lap, directed the pilot into the land ing zone. They dipped, found the canal and hovered along the water way between one-and two-level warehouses. Lifting slightly over a lock, they came down again and then they were hovering over the wooded area. It was four pm, humidity building, skies becoming overcast.

  Picnickers stood up, held onto hats and scarpered as the down draught from the helos tore leaves off trees.

  They hovered to the park between the trees, touched down.

  De-powered.

  Sawtell’s four-man unit spilled out of the Black Hawk in their in-country clothing: olive drab overalls, bullet-proof vests underneath.

  Mac saw Spikey. They greeted, thumb shake.

  ”Zit going, champ?’

  ‘Man! That you in the window?’ asked Spikey.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Man! No wonder you’re called Chalks.’

  Paul walked over from the Gazelle with two white kevlar vests.

  Pulling down their ovies, they strapped the vests in place.

  Crouched beneath a banyan tree, they peered at Mac’s map. Paul put down the pictures of Rachel, Fiona and Karen, made sure he said their names. The Special Forces guys soaked up the images like they were drinking. Mac knew the kind of exercises these boys would be doing day after day on their base: rego numbers, photos, phone numbers, website addresses, email addresses, log-ons, PINs. Seven photos of the same person in different disguises over a fi fteen-year period. Information fed to you in fl ashes, information that in the fi eld could be the difference between life and death. Exercises under extreme pressure where you had to force your mind to resemble a photographic memory.

  Sawtell and Paul talked in military acronyms and short cuts.

  Mac was relieved they wanted to take a stealth approach rather than a ‘dynamic’. Dynamics could work when you had intelligence, via thermo sensors, listening posts and fi bre optic eyes, but if you didn’t have that intel, and you were rushing, the dynamic approach was riskier for the hostages than the hostage-takers.

  The two agreed on everything except the closing scene. Sawtell’s mission was to render Garrison and Sabaya. Paul made it clear that if something made him jumpy, he’d shoot it. ‘I’ll give myself plenty of time to fi gure out which way to point his arse.’

  Sawtell eyeballed him, laughed. ‘They teach you that shit too?’

  ‘Bear jerk off in the woods?’

  They jogged the nine blocks to the target carrying Beretta handguns, no rifl es. With the bullet-proofs, they all sweated heavily.

  The warehouse covered half a block. Perched on a corner hidden from the warehouse’s view, they could see across the road that the Arrow freight depot and warehouse had two entrances: one from the cross street and the other from the main street. A three-level administration block fronted the building, set back from a forty-metre apron. To the right of the offi ce section was a large dark-red roller door. Closed. A pedestrian door was set in the main door. Also closed. Behind the door, the warehouse roof stretched one hundred and twenty metres.

  Down the cross street side of the structure, there was another large roller door and an open parking lot.

  Sawtell double-checked the location. Wouldn’t pay to be stealthing around the wrong building.

  Sawtell turned to Paul. ‘Looks to me like two sections to this; that offi ce section and the warehouse section. We’ll take the offi ce. You two take the warehouse. Copy?’

  Paul nodded.

  ‘Right, ladies. Check radios,’ said Sawtell.

  Hands went up to earpieces while Sawtell rattled off the alphabet in Alpha Bravo Charlies. Got six thumbs-up.

  ‘Check clocks: on my marks …’

  Everyone started their mission clocks.

  ‘Check weapons.’

  Slides slid, mags dropped out and eyes looked down spouts. One of the Green Berets pulled the zip on his ovies down and checked the smoke grenades on his webbing.

  Sawtell checked his own Beretta, took a breath, said, ‘Ladies, you never get a second chance to make a fi rst impression.’

  ‘Fucking eh,’ came an American voice in reply.

  Mac checked for cameras, saw a dome protruding from the wall above the side entrance. Looked to the main entrance. Saw a dome there too.

  He pointed them out to Paul.

  ‘If we go through the offi cial entries someone’s going to know about it,’ said Mac.

  ‘Ideas?’

  ‘Just the oldest one in the book.’

  ‘Rough but effective,’ said Paul, keying the mic and asking Sawtell if their fi rst stop might be downstairs in the fuse box room.

  ‘Found cameras?’ said Sawtell.

  ‘One over each entrance.’

  ‘How long you need?’

  Paul looked at Mac, who said, ‘Twenty seconds.’

  ‘Stand-by,’ said Sawtell.

  Mac and Paul started down the cross street, hands in pockets, eyeing the warehouse door from across the road as they walked. In his pocket Mac felt the two thin wire jiggers from Spikey’s bag of tricks.

  They crossed the road, catching glimpses of the warehouse door through mid-sized trees. The pedestrian entrance was locked with a standard Lockwood device and if it was the type Mac had trained on, he’d only need ten seconds. If he sweated, slipped and screwed it up, he’d need the twenty. Twenty seconds was an optimum time to pull the power down in Jakkers. It was long enough that when you started it
up again the bad guys might assume it was the unreliable power supply on the blink.

  Sawtell sit-repped: Spikey had walked straight in the front entrance, and dipped down to the basement.

  Mac and Paul veered left and walked towards the side entry door fi fty metres away, their eyes locked on the fl uoro lights under the awning over the side entrance. Their breathing was ragged now, their hands sweaty in the afternoon humidity. It had to be thirty-fi ve degrees. They closed on the door, waiting for the power to be killed.

  The lights went down and Mac and Paul ran the last fi ve strides to the door, Mac dragging out the jiggers. First one in, holding the barrel where you want it. His fi ngers slid on the wire. He jigged the second piece of wire over the top of the fi rst, twisted and pushed upward from the front to the back of the lock. The second part of the mechanism turned and Paul’s pressure on the door made it click inwards.

  Paul held his SIG in his right hand, pushed through with his left.

  Mac followed. The fl uoros fl ashed on again. Paul shut the door gently as Mac moved into the interior.

  The lights in the warehouse were fl ickering back to life too.

  They swept with their guns. It looked like they had the place to themselves. There was a large empty indoor space in front of them, obviously where traffi c passed through. To the right were lanes of stacked containers.

  Suddenly they heard voices and slid to the right four paces, crouching behind red containers stacked two-up.

  Indonesian voices echoed around the warehouse, coming closer.

  Paul stuck his head around, pulled back. ‘They’re just checking the place with a fl ashlight. What the fuck you need a fl ashlight for when the lights have gone back on?’

  Paul looked again. ‘Okay, so now they’re looking at the ceiling.

  And wouldn’t you know it - lights!’

  Paul turned and looked down the narrow alleyway where the containers didn’t quite touch the steel side of the warehouse. It ran to the end of the building. ‘Better recce, eh mate?’

  Mac nodded. If there was an offi ce or a van at the other end of the structure, they’d better fi nd it. The girls and the woman were not going to come to them.