Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘That haircut suits you much better.’ Mac pulled a bottle of water from his pack and handed it to the novice. ‘Drink that – keep your fluids up.’

  As Mac knocked his backpack against the console, a set of keys and the SD memory chip he’d found at the Mekong Saloon fell on the floor in front of Lance. Ignoring the keys, the youngster picked up the memory card. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Memory card,’ said Mac, gesturing at his keys.

  Grabbing the keys and handing them back, Lance held on to the chip. ‘What’s on it?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Mac. ‘Plug it into the laptop.’

  ‘No slots,’ said Lance. ‘Where did you say you got it?’

  Mac caught sight of the Patrol trying to jockey closer to the van as they closed on the border crossing. ‘Can’t remember.’

  Mac took the memory card back and turned to Tranh. ‘Our friends in the Patrol – they with us from Saigon?’

  Tranh nodded.

  The Chinese never left home without a backup crew or some kind of electronic measures, and as the taupe arches of the customs and immigration gates rose in front of them, Mac thought about the choice between playing it safe and pretending not to notice the MSS, or flushing them out and seeing if they declared their intentions.

  The manual said to act as if nothing was wrong, to go to fallbacks and then switch to counter-surveillance. Such techniques could be useful but they were usually taught by people who didn’t live in the field and whose experience was confined to being a declared intelligence officer at an embassy or consulate.

  In Mac’s world, where you lived an undeclared corporate cover, never ventured near Australian consular premises, and could be tried as a spy if caught, the rules were different. In Mac’s world, to react to surveillance by the book amounted to an admission of espionage.Besides, thought Mac, as they joined the non-truck queue into Cambodia, if these Chinese blokes had held off in Vietnam, who knew what they felt licensed to do in Cambodia?

  ‘Tranh, where would you rather deal with the MSS: here or Cambodia?’

  ‘Cambodia is no good,’ said Tranh, turning his mouth down. ‘Chinese do what they want over there.’

  ‘Can we lose them in this queue?’

  Looking in his mirror, Tranh focused and lit another cigarette. ‘Maybe – see who we have on the gate.’

  The queue edged forwards, the Vietnamese border guards asking for passports or registration at every fourth or fifth car. The guards nodded Tranh through and they joined the queue across a tarmac courtyard to go through Cambodian customs.

  ‘They behind us?’ asked Mac, as the Cambodian customs officer walked towards Tranh’s window.

  ‘Yep – one car, then it’s them.’

  The Cambodian officer counted the occupants, said something to Tranh and put his hand out. Collecting the passports, the guard took his ten-dollar greenback from the top booklet, stamped the passports on his little shaded lectern, and returned them to Tranh.

  Joking with the guard, Tranh got him laughing, handed him the rest of his pack of Marlboros and gestured with his thumb over his shoulder. Mac liked Tranh’s style: the man was an enlister.

  As they eased out of the customs area onto the highway into Phnom Penh, Mac heard the official who’d stamped their passports yelling into the guardhouse and an overweight senior guard staggered out into the heat.

  Hitting the gas, they accelerated to full speed and, through the back window, Mac and Lance saw a group of guards descend on the red Nissan Patrol.

  ‘Nice work,’ said Mac, as the Nissan’s driver was hauled out of the car. ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I said the cases of Johnnie Walker we taking into Phnom are all in the red Patrol – tell him our friends got a case for the guards.’

  ‘Ha! You hear that, mate?’ said Mac.

  ‘Yep – that’s pretty cool,’ said Lance, wide-eyed and gulping.

  Crossing the Mekong at a little after four pm, they followed the famous river north from Banam into Phnom Penh, keeping pace with the trucks that plied National Highway One between the two former jewels of French Indochina. Circling the Hawaii Hotel, they stopped one block away and Mac asked Tranh to check in and pay with cash.

  When Tranh re-emerged they headed across town, the clouds weighing heavy in the late afternoon, and booked into the Cambodiana Hotel under Tranh’s name and passport. When the MSS bribed a night manager to have a look at the guest manifest, Mac wanted them scanning a whole pile of names native to the Mekong Delta.

  Parking around the back, they headed for their rooms with Mac calling for a meeting in fifteen minutes in his suite. As the doors shut, Mac turned immediately to Tranh, who had a room in Mac’s suite.

  ‘I’ve got someone to see tonight,’ said Mac, handing over five US ten-dollar notes – a small fortune in Phnom Penh. ‘I want you to take Lance out for a drink and a look around.’

  ‘You want me to talk with him?’

  ‘I want you to shut up about anything to do with Captain Loan, the Mekong Saloon or Jim Quirk. I think he’s reporting to someone.’

  ‘Okay, Mr Richard.’

  ‘So, just go to all the Aussie bars and be seen, eh?’ said Mac. ‘I want to get an idea of the Chinese, see how many there are.’

  ‘Okay – but look after Mr Lance?’

  ‘Yeah, mate, let’s get him drunk and see what he’s about. I’ll meet you at the Ozzie Bar at eight.’

  Briefing Lance to stay close to Tranh and obey his instructions, Mac gave him the location of what he called Red Fallback: the boat-hire precinct on Sisowath Quay, at the end of Hassakan.

  Leaving by the laundry entrance at the rear of the Cambodiana after slipping an American one-dollar note to the duty manager, Mac strolled down the alley behind the hotel and waited at the intersection with the street. Hailing a cyclo, he asked the rider to head across town. Approaching the river, they ducked into a side alley that connected with a rear service lane. Paying him four US dollars, Mac asked him to stay where he was for half an hour. Mac wasn’t going to use him again – he just didn’t want any surveillance teams to see the cyclo emerge from the lane without the passenger.

  Hitting the buzzer at the rear of the Taberna, Mac presented his face to the camera. ‘I’ve got a package to pick up,’ he said, looking up and down the alley as the first spits of rain started. Miles up in the atmosphere, a thunder clap shook the air, making Mac flinch.

  Cambodian voices ummed and aahed.

  ‘You can bring it out if you want,’ Mac shouted at the speaker as the thunder bellowed and the cyclo rider pulled his plastic poncho from under his seat and put it on.

  Around them the roar of the monsoon drowned out all other sound as the rain started in earnest and increased its volume to such an intensity that Mac couldn’t speak without his mouth filling up with water, raindrops bouncing chest-high off the concrete laneway that until thirty seconds ago had been dusty.

  ‘Let’s go around to the front entrance,’ he said to the cyclo rider, easing himself back into the seat which was now a pond.

  As Mac spilled out of the cyclo and hobbled on his dicky knee for the bar entrance, the rainfall boomed like a naval battle. Walking to the counter, dripping, Mac saw the source of the vagueness – a middle-aged local.

  ‘You the mister on speaker?’ the man asked, confused but benign.

  ‘Yep,’ said Mac, holding his arms out as a puddle formed around him.

  The man gave him a towel. Taking a seat at the bar as he clocked his surrounds, Mac saw someone he recognised – a heavily built man in his fifties, sitting at a table.

  ‘Macca!’ said Boo Bray, standing and laughing as he took in Mac’s drenched form. This was not Calhoun.

  Towelling his hair and easing out of his wet shoes, Mac wondered what Bray was doing in Phnom Penh
. Boo Bray was a former RAN military policeman who headed the Australian government’s I-team – a group of ex-military and law enforcement people who retrieved official Australian representatives when they went off the rails.

  ‘In Phnom Penh for long, Macca?’ said Boo.

  ‘Long enough for a beer,’ said Mac, deciding he was going to get dry clothes from the market before returning and doing the pick-up from this bar. He wasn’t going to seek out Calhoun in front of Bray.

  ‘I’ll join you later – where you boozing?’ said Boo, his big red face friendly enough considering Mac had once had to punch it very hard.

  ‘Ozzie Bar,’ said Mac. ‘So why you up here?’

  ‘I was in Saigon for a retrieval,’ said Boo.

  ‘This is Phnom Penh, Boo.’ Mac wiped off his arms.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Boo, drinking his beer and looking at his watch. ‘Arrived in Saigon and this high-flier bird is missing.’

  ‘Missing?’ said Mac, wondering where Geraldine McHugh really fitted into the failed Operation Dragon.

  ‘Yeah, she’s AWOL, mate,’ said Boo Bray. ‘They can go bad, even the best of them.’

  Chapter 22

  Mac brooded on Boo Bray’s gossip as he hailed a tuc-tuc and asked for the night markets. Geraldine McHugh – if that was the high-flier in Saigon Boo was talking about – was on the Canberra radar before Quirk was murdered. Why wasn’t Mac told about it?

  The tuc-tuc surged down Sisowath Quay, the bike ploughing through the monsoon water like a speedboat, before they turned left and stopped at the markets.

  Gasping as he got out of the passenger trailer, Mac stood to his mid-shins in water as the driver joined him. ‘Mister want the porn? Mister want the pro’tute?’

  ‘No, champ,’ said Mac, as the driver opened a large black umbrella and held it over his head. ‘Mister want dry shirt and shorts.’

  Leading him into the market area, where the traders had erected a shanty town of various tarpaulins and plastic sheets to keep their stalls dry, the driver seemed to know exactly where he was going in the labyrinth.

  ‘Okay, the clothe – for you, mister, best pry,’ said the driver as he stopped at a stall and began a machine-gun exchange of haggling with the owner. For five US dollars, Mac got two pairs of shorts, two shirts, a fold-up umbrella and a pair of sandals.

  The rain had eased by the time they got back to the Taberna, and Mac asked to be dropped fifty metres past the bar.

  Limping up the footpath, Mac assessed the largely empty street before walking into the Taberna and taking a seat at the south end of the bar. The tourists had cleared out with the rain and Boo Bray had also left.

  ‘Yes, mister?’ said the barman, a youngster.

  As Mac made to answer, an American voice interrupted. ‘That’s a Bundy and dry – easy on the ice, thanks, Bourey.’

  Standing, Mac took in the tanned, white-haired vision of Harley Maggins, owner of the Taberna.

  ‘Hey, Macca,’ said the American, shaking hands with genuine affection.

  ‘Maggs,’ said Mac. ‘Drove all your drinkers away – must have known I was coming.’

  ‘Albion?’ said Maggins.

  ‘Calhoun?’

  Catching up with the small talk, Mac let the memories come back as he observed Maggins. The American was one of the overstayers from the UNTAC days, when the United Nations was attempting to stabilise Cambodia after its atrocious postcolonial history. There were warlords and remnants of the Khmer Rouge in the north and drug lords, arms dealers and slavers working with impunity in what was a failed state in the early 1990s. Mac had spent some time in Phnom Penh with the Australian delegation to UNAMIC, which ultimately became a wider operation as UNTAC. He’d met Harley back then, when neither of them were declaring who they were or which departments they were really answering to. UNTAC had been a transitional government in a lawless territory and Mac was going on military patrols into places where Thailand, Vietnam and Laos were securing commercial advantages they shouldn’t have had. It wasn’t helped by the presence of Bulgarian blue helmets in Kampong Speu province who were giving the Khmer Rouge the idea that they could opt out of the peace process.

  While posing as a logging consultant, Mac shared a meal with a KR commander called the Duck, so-named because of his horizontal upper lip.

  As they’d discussed a ten-thousand-acre forestry concession, Mac had been offered a child for sex. Refusing, Mac had kept the strongman sweet as he got more drunk; Mac eventually learned that the KR in this part of the world was kidnapping children from villages and selling them to Thai slavers.

  When a skirmish broke out in a neighbouring valley, the Duck sent his men out to deal with it and kept drinking with Mac. Finally they’d gone for a walk down to a warehouse where about thirty kids were being kept in wire-mesh cages until they could be onsold to paedophiles in Europe and North America.

  Mac had opened the cages, rung the UN policing unit and then driven his yellow Toyota HiLux back to town. The Duck was later found lying in a dumpster with a third eye. That was the way the news had travelled to the UNTAC heads of mission in Phnom Penh who – in order to keep the elections on track – had to be seen to do something about the murder.

  At about the point when Mac was going to face charges brought by the UN’s Indonesian military police, the allegations went away as an eyewitness fingered a rival Khmer Rouge commander as the culprit.

  Mac had never officially been told where his alibi came from but unofficially he’d discovered that an American intelligence operator by the name of Harley Maggins had stepped in and provided the right intelligence at the right time.

  The two of them had never discussed it, but after Mac came back to Cambodia in the late 1990s and found Maggins running the Taberna, they’d forged a friendship.

  ‘So what’s going on, buddy?’ said Maggins, clinking drinks.

  ‘Just enjoying the climate of Indochina.’

  ‘Yeah – it’s the right time of year.’

  ‘So, Maggs, have the Chinese been around?’ said Mac. ‘You know, MSS, PLA – that sort of thing.’

  ‘This is Cambodia,’ said Maggins with a laugh. ‘The Chinese think they own the place, man.’

  The street was enjoying an eerie silence, the period of grace that followed a big monsoon downpour. A cricket chirped and birds squawked.

  ‘I think I was followed, from Saigon,’ said Mac, enjoying the drink.

  ‘From Vietnam? That’s serious,’ said Maggins, pale eyes stready.

  ‘We lost ’em,’ said Mac. ‘But we won’t stay lost for long in Phnom Penh.’

  Bourey asked for another order and Maggins raised a peace sign. The barman had been rescued from Bangkok ten years earlier, where he’d been kept in a brothel with his two younger sisters. Maggins had agreed to give him a job after he’d been brought back to Cambodia by the Sisters of Mercy. The Sisters weren’t nuns – they were an informal network of women working in law enforcement, diplomacy, intelligence, foreign aid, health care and NGOs who tried to unpick the cronyism that allowed sex slavery to thrive in South-East Asia. To do that they shared information they shouldn’t share, wrote reports they were not allowed to write and alerted newspapers and politicians to the outrages that they were being asked to whitewash. The Sisters of Mercy were almost an intelligence service unto themselves, and even though Mac was pretty sure Jenny was one of them, he’d never pushed the issue. While it was an all-female affair, Mac knew that Harley Maggins was a trusted operative for the Sisters.

  ‘So nothing on the MSS?’ asked Mac.

  ‘I’ll ask around,’ said Maggins, eyeing a German couple who had crept in from the canal-like Sisowath Quay. ‘But the Chinese are business as usual these days. It’s the privateers you have to watch, which is what that’s all about.’

  Mac followed Maggins
’ nod and saw a manila envelope on the counter beside his right shoulder. The young barman must have put it there.

  ‘Anything I should know about?’ said Mac, picking up the package and opening it. There were three colour prints, two showing a green LandCruiser but with no view of the rego plates.

  ‘Intrepid put the word out, and these guys had been drink- ing here.’ Maggins lit a cigarette. ‘So getting pics wasn’t a hassle.’

  ‘Mercenaries?’ said Mac.

  ‘I’m guessing ex-intel guys.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They’re Israeli,’ said Maggins. ‘Could be Mossad, IDF, whatever. But definitely Israeli.’

  The third picture showed a group of tanned men sitting at one of the Taberna’s outside tables. All wore sunglasses, generic shirts and slacks. Hidden slightly by a man leaning forwards in the group was the unmistakable profile of the man who’d killed Jim Quirk.

  Chapter 23

  The Ozzie Bar was filling with English-speaking tourists in the orange glow of the post-monsoon sunset. As a band sang about a woman who keeps no secrets, Mac held back in the shadows of a tourist T-shirt shop, peering over the clothes rack, trying to determine where the Chinese had their watchers.

  His G-Shock said it was eleven minutes before he was due to meet Tranh and Lance for a drink. There were no obvious eyes on the street but, as he watched, a tuc-tuc pulled up outside the bar and Boo Bray eased his bulk out onto the drying tarmac and fished for money.

  Wearing a South Grafton Rebels JRLFC polo shirt and pair of white pointy shoes under his jeans, Bray looked like the typical Aussie on the prowl as he ducked through the Ozzie Bar door.

  Staying put, Mac let the street unfold, looking for new patterns and eyes. Two minutes went past and Mac was about to move when a young Chinese man stopped two doors from the Ozzie Bar and consulted a tourist map, while at the same time a tuc-tuc stopped almost in front of Mac’s position. The athletically built Chinese man sitting in the back of the tuc-tuc made no effort to get out and a flash of recognition crossed between him and the tourist across the street.