Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  Praise for Mark Abernethy

  ‘Golden Serpent is the most accomplished spy-thriller we’ve seen locally, a discerning read, full of action and a kind of knowing wit.’

  The Australian

  ‘Abernethy conjures echoes of Fleming, Ludlum, Clancy and the Jack Reacher novels of Lee Child.’

  Weekend Australian

  ‘Abernethy has once again hit the mark. Gripping.’

  Herald Sun

  ‘Fast-paced and action-packed, Second Strike is one of the better post-9/11 thrillers.’

  The Age

  ‘This is a rip-roaring tale of espionage, terrorism and counter-intelligence.’

  Sunday Tasmanian

  ‘Abernethy’s first novel follows the Tom Clancy model, but with an irreverent, distinctly Australian twist . . . Abernethy writes of a world where Maori mercenaries meet hi-tech shipping and the most inventive ways of killing people . . . For those who like thrillers, this is satisfying fare.’

  Sunday Age

  ‘I have had the pleasure in recent years of discovering several Aussie authors – Matthew Reilly, James Phelan and David Rollins – capable of taking on the world’s best in the “techno-thriller” stakes. Now add Mark Abernethy to the list.’

  Sunshine Coast Daily

  Mark Abernethy is a former newspaper reporter and magazine editor whose first novel, Golden Serpent, was published in 2007. Its sequel Second Strike was published in 2008 and Double Back in 2009. Mark lives in New South Wales. Read more at:

  www.alanmcqueen.com.au

  First published in 2011

  Copyright © Mark Abernethy 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  The author, Mark Abernethy, asserts the Moral Right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Arena Books, an imprint of

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 939 6

  Typeset in Joanna MT 12.5/15.5 pt by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Natasha, Georgette and Luke

  Chapter 1

  There were three of them in the fifteenth-floor suite of the Hotel Pan Pacific, waiting for the radio to confirm the quarry was on its way. Alan McQueen stood at the large windows of the suite, looking over the oily waters of Singapore’s Marina Bay.

  Draining his coffee, Mac thought about the plan. His job was to trap a Chinese spy and persuade him to work for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. If Mac was successful, the doubled spy would be reporting to the Firm while pretending to take his orders from Beijing.

  Looking into his empty cup, Mac pondered the eternal question of why hotel crockery was so small.

  ‘Any real mugs back there, Matty?’ he asked Matt Johnson, his comms man.

  ‘That’s the biggest I could find,’ said Johnson, an operative in his early thirties who sat at a laptop computer beneath a street map of Singapore. Mac saw his younger self in Matt, an athletic field guy who was probably starting to wonder if being good at tails and infiltrations was a clever career move in Aussie intel.

  ‘Might have to use one of those tumblers,’ said Mac, seeing the rows of glasses in the kitchenette.

  ‘Bring out the inner-city tosser in you, eh, Macca?’ said Johnson, smirking behind the mic in front of his mouth.

  A raw snort came from the sofa on the other side of the room, where Raymond Hu’s face had set in the serious rictus of sleep.

  ‘Ray!’ said Mac, raising his voice at the native of Yangzhou. ‘Wake up, sunshine!’

  Hu’s lips vibrated in a rattling snore.

  Johnson threw a peanut. ‘Ray.’

  The first nut missed but a second landed on the sleeping man’s left eyelid.

  ‘Wah?’ said Hu, sitting up.

  ‘It’s four o’clock, old boy,’ said Mac. ‘Ready for your close-up?’

  Groaning, Hu pushed himself off the sofa and walked stiff-legged to the bathroom.

  ‘Fricking Sing’pore,’ said Hu, his thick Chinese accent echoing out of the bathroom as he relieved himself. ‘What point in a free world if I can’t have a smoke?’

  Dressed in his four-thousand-dollar suit and Spanish shoes, Hu slipped out to attend the five o’clock meet-and-greet function of the Asia-Pacific Naval Contractors Convention. Hu could blend into a bar or a cocktail party and be gathering information before anyone had even noticed that he’d joined the conversation. The plan hinged on the grumpy financier and Mac trusted him to perform.

  The radio speakers crackled to life on Johnson’s desk as the door shut behind Hu. It was the voice of Cam Bailey, an Aussie SIS operator who had started his career at naval intelligence.

  Mac listened as Bailey and his Changi Airport-based team got visual identification of the target – code-named Kava – and followed him from the T2 taxi rank. One of Mac’s agents was in a cab behind Kava’s while Bailey and a driver brought up the rear in another cab, ensuring there was no Chinese counter-surveillance.

  Mac raised the field-glasses on the windowsill to his eyes and idly checked Raffles Boulevard. He was looking for tradie vans with no tradies, men on park benches reading upside-down newspapers and ‘tourists’ walking about aimlessly pretending to look at maps. Singapore was a modern republic but it was in South-East Asia, which meant it was crawling with Chinese spies.

  ‘We’re on,’ said Johnson, fiddling with the laptop that showed him the location of the agents’ cell phones.

  ‘We’re on when Kava is sitting in a puddle of his own piss, begging me to make him a double agent,’ murmured Mac, eyeing two SingTel workers on the street who didn’t seem to be working.

  Kava was a Brisbane-based scientist, Dr Xiang Lao, who worked for the defence contractors Raytheon Australia. His main responsibility was making sure the electronic networks in the Royal Australian Navy’s SEA 4000 Air Warfare Destroyer program would issue the commands they were supposed to, even when under attack. SEA 4000 AWD was Australia’s new destroyer-based defence against anti-shipping missiles, the most likely of which were China’s old but reliable Silkworms and their recently upgraded ballistic series, the Dong Fengs.

  Sitting back on the sofa, Mac picked up the file: Lao had come to Australia as a sixteen-year-old prodigy to study avionics engineering at the University of New South Wales; he completed his doctorate at RMIT and then landed a plum job at Raytheon in Brisbane. Several weeks later, Raytheon won the contract to supply the Navy’s SEA 4000 upgrades.

  A photograph of Lao had surfaced ten months later, taken by a police narcotics s
quad watching the Colmslie Beach Reserve on the Brisbane River.

  Queensland Police supplied the surveillance file to the Australian Federal Police, who claimed no interest in Dr Lao. But the biggest bounce from Lao’s photo had come from the Defence Security Authority, the internal vetting and security office under the Defence Intelligence Organisation. The DSA had issued Lao a ‘Top Secret’ clearance to work at Raytheon, but had flagged him because he applied for clearance only a few weeks after his first ten years’ residency in Australia had elapsed. To receive any of the higher security clearances in government or at defence contractors, applicants had to have lived in Australia for at least a decade, and DSA had him flagged as a ‘watch’. Now he was hanging around in Brisbane parks being photographed by the police.

  By the time Mac had been pulled into a taskforce of ASIO, AFP, ASIS and DIO, a team of operatives had been watching Lao walk every Monday lunchtime to a park bench at Colmslie Reserve, eat his lunch, and then carefully put his garbage in the bin. It was Lao’s drop box and it was traced back to a person who cleared it, and then back to Lao’s controller, a mortgage broker in Logan City named Donny Koh.

  Mac was supposed to be sitting in on the taskforce, as passive eyes and ears for Aussie SIS. Almost forty, he was semi-retired from the Firm and was sent up to Brisbane because he lived on the Gold Coast and sending him was easier than taking a staffer from a desk.

  As the drops were intercepted, it became apparent Dr Lao was an enthusiastic seller of Australian naval secrets. There was pressure from Canberra to pounce and put on a show trial – a sort of return to glory for Aussie intelligence after the apparently bungled Dr Haneef case.

  Mac had made the mistake of suggesting another way forwards: let the traitor run, see what advantage Australia might gain from it. Dr Lao seemed to be a good fit as a double agent – he was selling naval secrets direct to Chinese military intelligence, he had a young family and Aussie intel had identified his controller.

  Someone high up in the bureausphere – perhaps even in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet – had read the minutes of that taskforce meeting and Mac had felt the tap on his shoulder.

  So Mac was back: back in South-East Asia, back in SIS and back in a world of gut-churning worry.

  ‘They’re five minutes away,’ said Johnson, breaking into Mac’s thoughts. ‘You want Yellow team alerted?’

  Nodding, Mac reached for the room’s phone and dialled reception. He’d sent Hu in clean in case the Chinese had any of their fancy electronic eavesdropping devices at the convention.

  ‘Could you page Mr Chan – Johnny Chan – please?’ he said into the phone. ‘I think he’s in the bar.’

  Walking to the big windows with the phone in one hand and the handset in the other, Mac looked down on what had been ‘turn six’ at the F1 Grand Prix two weeks earlier. The traffic seemed normal on Raffles Boulevard and it was late enough that the cops were starting to clear parked traffic – surveillance cars would either be moved on or would stand out to a trained observer. Nothing looked amiss, which didn’t mean it wasn’t.

  ‘Ray,’ said Mac as his agent came on the line. ‘Kava’s two minutes away – blue cab, white roof.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Hu.

  ‘The place clean?’ said Mac, adrenaline surging.

  ‘It a naval contractor convention, McQueen,’ said Hu. ‘It all spook.’

  ‘You’ve got backup, Ray,’ said Mac. ‘Let’s get Kava tucked away asap, okay? No dancing with this bloke.’

  ‘Okay. See you when I see you.’

  Putting the phone down, Mac pondered the ‘ifs’ of the operation: if Dr Lao had worked out that Aussie intelligence were running the drops at the rubbish bin in Brisbane; if Ray Hu had not been accepted in his masquerade as Lao’s controller; if the mortgage broker had made an unscheduled and unexpected phone call or email to Dr Lao, and discovered he was in Singapore, not Brisbane.

  Mac’s ruse relied on inexperienced Lao being manipulated into bringing naval secrets to his fake controller in Singapore. All of which had to happen between Monday drops and without the Chinese getting wind of it. The idea was to bring Lao out of his comfort zone in Brisbane, to elevate his importance and to have him physically more involved in espionage; to get him alone in a room and thinking he was speaking to his man from Beijing. Then record the whole thing and close the trap: We got you on tape selling Australian Navy secrets to the Chinese, Dr Lao. The Chinese don’t want you going through an Australian court system, spilling everything to the newspapers, and you don’t want to worry about your family, so why not just keep business as usual with Beijing but have a little chat with us a couple of times a week? How would that be for you?

  It was blackmail but it usually worked. If Mac’s team got it wrong, and they were being followed themselves, it would be a painful lesson in the interrogation techniques of the MSS – China’s CIA.

  ‘Will this work?’ said Johnson.

  ‘Like a dream, squire,’ said Mac, raising the field-glasses and checking out the telecom van parked on Raffles. ‘Like a fucking dream.’

  Chapter 2

  Three short knocks sounded on the suite’s door and Isla Dunford moved into the room. She’d just left her post at the hotel’s entry as Bailey had followed Kava into the lobby and assumed the surveillance.

  ‘Looking good,’ she said, pulling up a chair beside Johnson and peering at the laptop screen. ‘Kava’s in the hubcap.’

  Among Aussie intel types, a meeting at the hubcap meant the Pan Pac’s lobby lounge, which had a huge round mezzanine ceiling floating above it.

  ‘We okay?’ said Mac. ‘You followed?’

  ‘We’re sweet,’ said Dunford, grimacing slightly as she pulled her Colt handgun from the holster at the small of her back and placed it on Johnson’s desk.

  Isla Dunford was just starting her career with SIS and the fact she was actively in the field owed a lot to Mac championing her over the policy that women didn’t work on gigs involving firearms. Mac had noticed her at a field-craft module he’d given in Canberra two years earlier. Dunford was a smart, calm, good-looking woman and he’d fought for her not only because she spoke Cantonese, but because female officers broke up the male pattern and made it harder for counter-surveillance.

  The chaps in Canberra had a sense of humour, and the first operation Mac had scored after his return from retirement featured Isla Dunford on the surveillance team. Now, seeing the bright-eyed youngster place her gun on the desk, the responsibility of his position came into focus. Mac could no longer just do the gig and go victory-drinking with the troops. When you ran the operation, the most important part was bringing everyone home with their fingernails intact.

  All of Mac’s team in the lobby of the hotel were now stripped of radio gear. It wasn’t an ideal situation and it made Mac nervous to be off the air, but the Chinese comms-intercepts were so good that even the Americans and Israelis couldn’t rely on encryptions and scrambles when they knew the MSS was about. The next-door suite they’d wired for sound had no radio transmissions – it was wired directly into their own suite.

  ‘How’s the set-up in 1502?’ said Mac.

  ‘Good,’ said Johnson.

  ‘Check it again,’ said Mac, grabbing the field-glasses and having another look at the SingTel van on Raffles. It hadn’t been moved by the cops and the tradesmen were standing at a junction box, the door flapping open.

  The suite’s door shut behind Dunford as Mac focused on one of the SingTel guys: his red overalls looked clean.

  A voice crackled out of the speakers on the desk – Dunford speaking in Cantonese from 1502, next door.

  ‘What’s she saying?’ said Mac.

  ‘Here I am in the lounge, here I am in the bedroom, that loo needs a clean, and . . .’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She’s saying, “When
this is over, Macca shouts the beers.”’

  ‘Cheeky bugger,’ said Mac, lifting the field-glasses back to his eyes.

  Once Lao was in room 1502 with Ray Hu, the meeting proceeded as expected, every word being downloaded onto the laptop’s hard drive. Johnson adjusted the speaker volume and translated as Ray Hu coaxed the Raytheon documents from Dr Lao’s attaché case and then kept the traitor talking about progress on the SEA 4000 upgrades: the key scientists, the names of the managers, the main difficulties and the testing that had taken place.

  As the talk got more technical, Mac asked Dunford to grab the glasses and keep an eye on the SingTel van, tell him if there was any change.

  Lao opened up about the AESA-defeat project at Raytheon which was going to form a major plank of SEA 4000. Lao explained that he was trying to get assigned to AESA-defeat but security was being run by the US Defense Intelligence Agency and the project was above his clearance.

  Mac pricked up his ears at the mention of AESA, a high-tech radar that could take millions of snapshots around the plane it was mounted on, in such short bursts that it was almost impossible for detectors on the ground to pick up the radar emissions – one of the main ways that defence systems detected enemy aircraft.

  An AESA-type system was probably the only hope the Chinese had to make their ballistic anti-ship missile – the DF 21 – operate properly. The DF 21 was being developed to fly between one and a half and two and a half thousand kilometres from China’s coast as a deterrent against US Navy carrier strike groups. A ballistic missile was a rocket that flew out of the atmosphere and on its downward trajectory took its warhead at great speeds onto the target below. To be accurate against a moving target such as a ship, it needed an AESA system onboard to steer it as it re-entered the atmosphere at speeds approaching mach 10. An onboard AESA system was about the only way that ballistic missiles could be controlled by terminal guidance – that is, the missile could be made to fly into its target rather than simply being aimed accurately at take-off or tweaked in its mid-course trajectory.