Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Shit,’ said Mac. Boo had been followed from Saigon?

  Keeping his eyes averted, Mac slipped out of the T-shirt shop and moved through the gaudily lit street, away from the Ozzie Bar. The crowds were back after the torrential rain and he blended quickly with the tourists and traders.

  It didn’t take more than thirty seconds of walking before Mac found who he was looking for. The woman sat cross-legged on the seagrass mat, her limp baby draped across her lap like old celery, its head almost inside the begging bowl.

  Tearing a US fifty-dollar note in half, Mac showed her one half of the note, making her single good eye light up while the empty socket of the other crinkled with focus.

  ‘Other half – him there,’ he said, pointing back to the man waiting in the tuc-tuc. ‘You go now – money for you there.’

  As the woman grabbed at the half-note and stood, Mac moved to the next beggar – a dark man with opium eyes and no legs.

  ‘You want fif’ dollar?’ asked Mac, showing the man his remaining half-note. ‘Chinee tourit – he got money for you.’

  His eyes following the line of Mac’s pointing finger, the beggar snatched the note and started swinging his torso through his arms as he headed across the street, his eyes not leaving the watcher with the tourist map.

  Giving the two beggars a ten-second start, Mac wandered into the street, casually weaving through the traffic as the woman started haranguing the man in the tuc-tuc. Moving on his rag-covered fists, the legless man covered a lot of ground very quickly and accosted the Chinese ‘tourist’. As the man looked around in a panic, not knowing what to do with this beggar demanding money, a trader came out of a shop and joined the argument. The trader poked the Chinese watcher in the chest, at which point the spy raised his hands in surrender, turned and walked away from the Ozzie Bar. As Mac neared the bar entrance, he stole a glance across the road where two portly women were yelping at the guy in the tuc-tuc. Their body language said, Well, what are you going to do for this poor woman?

  As the watcher turned his back on the Ozzie Bar to face his accusers, Mac slipped into the bar where Boo Bray was throwing back a bottle of Tiger.

  ‘Buying, are ya, Boo?’ said Mac as he stood beside the ex-MP, casing the bar over the big feller’s shoulder. Lance and Tranh had a table in the corner, in the darkness, giving them a view of the entrance, the bar and the toilet doors – a classic piece of field craft. The bar was filling with Anglos trying to get drunk and find a bedmate.

  Boo’s pale eyes scanned the crowd over Mac’s head. ‘What’s your poison?’

  ‘Tiger should do it,’ said Mac as the band opened with the first notes of ‘Friday on My Mind’.

  Keeping Boo at the bar, Mac caught up with the gossip: the Foreign Affairs lifer in Hong Kong who’d become a victim of the casinos in Macao and had started raiding the chancery coffers to sustain his habit; the bright up-and-comer in the Los Angeles Trade Commission who’d fallen for the overtures of a foxy Frenchman who was actually a Belgian spy.

  ‘These people are amazing,’ said Boo, shaking his head softly as he asked for two more beers. ‘She cried all the way home. I said, “What were you thinking, love? The dip-sec told you he was no good.” And she says, “Yeah, but I love him.”’

  ‘Those Frenchies are bloody charming, mate,’ said Mac.

  ‘Sure,’ said Bray, handing Mac a fresh beer. ‘But nothing a slap wouldn’t fix.’

  Acknowledging Tranh across the bar, Mac tried to keep things social with Boo while fishing for information. Boo and Mac had known each other for a number of years through the Jakarta and Manila embassy colonies, their personality differences always for- given because of the number of Aussie rugby teams they’d played in together. Boo was pushing fifty but he’d played in the most recent ANZAC Day footy match against the Kiwis and he’d apparently got himself into one of his traditional blues. Mac’s last encounter with Boo Bray and I-team had occurred a few years earlier in Makassar, where Boo and his sidekick Marlon had tried to retrieve Mac during the Golden Serpent debacle. Mac had busted Boo’s wrist and dislocated Marlon’s shoulder.

  Mac couldn’t sense any hard feelings about the incident. ‘So, how’s Marlon?’

  ‘He’s still working,’ said Boo, looking around the room as if he’d never stopped being an MP. ‘He’s on this gig.’

  ‘Not around?’

  ‘Just looking into a matter,’ said Boo with a grin, knowing how that would annoy a spy.

  Mac made to move to Tranh’s table. ‘Come and meet my friends.’

  ‘Nah, mate,’ said Bray, nodding across the room. ‘Thought I might say hello to the sorts.’

  Two European women were laughing at a stand-up table and Mac chuckled at Boo’s optimism. ‘I’ll leave you to it, mate.’

  Boo tested his breath. ‘Just ride shotgun – no follow-through, okay?’

  ‘Nah, mate – I’m sweet,’ said Mac.

  Ordering a round of beers, Mac heard a phone ring and, turning, watched Boo answer. Bray’s head sank into his chest and then he was placing his beer on a table and walking towards the exit beside the kitchen. Standing, Mac felt his pulse rise as he hooked his finger at Tranh.

  ‘Stay in here, get eyes on any watchers,’ said Mac as Tranh and Lance moved to him. ‘Call me when they arrive – and no heroes tonight, okay, fellas?’

  He was talking to Tranh, but he was looking at Lance. As he turned to go Tranh grabbed him by the elbow.

  ‘You armed, Mr Richard?’

  ‘No, mate,’ said Mac, wanting to get on Boo Bray’s tail.

  Turning to hide his body from the patrons, Tranh fished a Ruger handgun from under his trop shirt and pushed it into Mac’s hand.

  ‘Where the fuck . . .?’ said Mac, before realising it was ridiculous to tell the locals to go unarmed.

  ‘Okay – we’ll meet back at the clubhouse,’ said Mac, shoving the Ruger into his waistband and covering it with his market shirt as he made for the exit.

  The rear door behind the kitchen opened into a service alley that smelled the same as every service alley in South-East Asia – like an open sewer.

  Mac stepped carefully into the putrid darkness, encountering two kitchen hands smoking and complaining from their apple-box perches. To his right a silhouette of a man jogged away towards the lights of the cross street and paused at the edge of a building. Crouching beside the kitchen hands as Boo Bray turned to check if he was being followed, Mac kept eyes on him and watched the Aussie look left and right and then move slowly out of the shadow he was hiding in.

  Standing, Mac checked his own six o’clock and stealthed towards Bray, staying close to the wall and mountains of boxes, his mind racing. What had drawn Boo out into the night so quickly?

  As he closed on Boo, an engine revved and Mac made himself a promise: all he wanted was a look at the set-up and perhaps some insight into Jim Quirk’s murder.

  Boo Bray’s right hand moved with reflexive ease to the small of his back and what Mac assumed was a concealed firearm – the seven-shooter automatics that lay flat under a waistband. Then Boo stalked out of the darkness and crossed the street at the tail-end of a bunch of chatting locals.

  Jogging through the darkness, Mac closed on the end of the alley as the engine’s revs climbed to a scream.

  Making a hide behind a stack of boxes twenty feet before the end of the alley, Mac saw a large 4x4 flash by. Accelerating, the SUV was doing at least seventy kph in second gear as it hit Boo Bray with the front bumper bar, sending the Aussie eight feet into the air. Spinning over the bonnet like a rag doll, Boo slammed into the driver-side windscreen pillar and was flung onto the tarmac like chaff flying out of a combine.

  Female screams blended with the shriek of the over-revved motor as it continued to accelerate into the distance. Breaking from his hide, Mac raced to the middle
of the street where Boo Bray lay tangled and unconscious. Blood seeped dark and wet on the road as Mac knelt, grabbed Boo’s gun and trousered it – there was no need to complicate a road accident with concealed firearms.

  ‘Doctor – ambulance!’ yelled Mac at the growing crowd as he gulped for air.

  A young man yelled into a mobile phone while giving the thumbs-up and Mac turned back to Boo: the blood was coming from the head, and the left arm – collarbone too, probably – was broken. Trying to keep his own adrenaline out of the equation, he felt Boo’s carotid and identified a pulse but decided against moving him for fear of exacerbating a spinal injury.

  A siren wailed in the distance and Mac stood up slowly, panting with fear, his hyper-anxiety shutting out the yelling of the crowd which was openly gawking at the big Anglo lying in a twisted wreck. Beyond the throng, Mac focused on the hit-and-run vehicle, which took a left-hand corner a block north at high speed and disappeared.

  Moving away from the crowd before the police arrived, Mac ducked into a store front on the other side of the street and dialled Tranh.

  ‘Mate, there’s been an accident.’

  ‘I know, we’re on the other side of the road. I’m looking at you now,’ said Tranh. ‘That’s your friend, right?’

  ‘Yeah. Tell Lance to stay with my friend, okay?’ said Mac as he glimpsed Tranh and Lance through the rubber-neckers. ‘Lance can go to the hospital, practise his cover.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Tranh.

  ‘You and I, we’re going to find the people who tailed my friend here, okay?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Tranh. ‘I think that’s them in the tuc-tuc, north of you.’

  Looking, Mac saw the same tuc-tuc that had pulled up in front of the Ozzie Bar thirty minutes earlier: waiting, but with the driver seated and obviously on the clock, two heads in the back seat.

  ‘Brief Lance and get over here,’ said Mac as the tuc-tuc moved into the northbound traffic.

  Hailing his own tuc-tuc, Mac got into the back seat and watched the crowd disperse as the ambulance and police arrived. Tranh jogged up, got in and issued instructions to the driver.

  Mac had come up to Indochina to tail and report like a mature forty-year-old, but whoever was tailing him had moved to another level. In the Royal Marines, the entire culture was counter-attack: you hit me – I hit you; you shoot at me – you’d better have your vest on, mate. The first ten weeks of basic training at Poole had seen endless one-minute rounds of boxing where two candidates with gloves would slam the snot out of one another with no ducking or defensive manoeuvres allowed. You couldn’t retreat in these contests – once you toed the line, that’s where your toe stayed until the instructor called ‘time’. If you retreated you’d be thrown back in until you could no longer be called a ‘pea-heart’ – the lowest designation on a Royal Marines base.

  It was brutal and bloody but it taught Mac a very important lesson: when intellect and guile were no longer options, the only way home was to bludgeon the other bastard harder than he could bludgeon you.

  ‘Tell him to keep eyes but hold back,’ said Mac, his face hardening as he touched the Ruger and felt Boo’s gun in the small of his back.

  ‘Did you see who ran down your friend?’ said Tranh.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘No, but they know us,’ said Mac. ‘From Saigon.’

  ‘Saigon?’ said Tranh, eyes wide.

  ‘Yeah, Tranh – my mate was run down by a green LandCruiser.’

  ‘Not the Prado?’ said Tranh.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Mac.

  Chapter 24

  The tail didn’t last long. The tuc-tuc carrying the Chinese men stopped at an intersection and then the two men who’d followed Boo Bray to the Ozzie Bar emerged from the cab and walked to a red Toyota Camry parked in front of a fruit store.

  Mac got a look at them as his own tuc-tuc paused thirty metres behind the Toyota: one was tallish and slim, the other older – perhaps Mac’s age – and stocky but a smooth mover. Probably ex-military, decided Mac; most special forces soldiers eventually walked with their hips so their shoulders remained stable.

  ‘That them,’ said Tranh, as the older of the two men looked briefly in their direction before ducking into the passenger seat of the Toyota.

  ‘Them who?’ said Mac, abandoning the tuc-tuc to hail a taxi.

  ‘The strong one,’ said Tranh as a battered Nissan slowed to pick them up. ‘The one taking our picture.’

  ‘In Vietnam?’ said Mac, getting into the taxi.

  ‘In the red Patrol that passed us,’ said Tranh, frowning.

  The tail wound westward through the changing territory of Phnom Penh, the taxi maintaining a hundred-metre distance from the red Camry. Phnom Penh was still an enigma, all these years after Mac had first explored it: some streets were cosmopolitan and Western – or at least Hong Kong – in outlook, while others looked and smelled like something out of the nineteenth century. Wafts of sewage and rotten cabbage suddenly gave way to miasmas of incense outside trendy restaurants. In some blocks, people slept on the streets, guarded by dead-eyed men in shorts and singlets, while neighbouring blocks were well-lit and seemed as prosperous as Singapore.

  Mac’s mind was spinning as they moved further away from the river. What was going on? The crew who’d killed Jim Quirk in Saigon now runs over Boo Bray in Phnom Penh? Were the Chinese spies part of the same gig?

  There was another problem, thought Mac as he keyed his phone.

  ‘Lance – Mac,’ he said, cupping his mouth.

  ‘Shit, McQueen!’ said the novice, his breath short. ‘I mean – sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, mate. Can you talk?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Lance, almost panting.

  ‘You at the hospital?’

  ‘Yep, shit, I –’

  ‘Contact the embassy?’

  ‘Um, yeah – dip-sec’s here.’

  ‘Warren or something?’ said Mac.

  ‘Warner, Luke Warner,’ said Lance. ‘But there’s –’

  ‘Cops collared you yet?’

  ‘They tried.’

  ‘You weren’t there, saw nothing, don’t know the bloke, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lance. ‘Just being the good Aussie Samaritan.’

  ‘Good man,’ said Mac, as the taxi took a right and sped down Mao Tse Tung Boulevard after the Camry. ‘How’s Boo?’

  Lance’s tone changed. ‘He’s alive, but there’s something else.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Mac, not wanting anything else.

  ‘The detective asked me if I was travelling with Barry Bray, and I said no.’

  ‘Yeah?’ said Mac.

  ‘Then he asks me if I’m travelling with Marlon T’avai and I said no.’

  ‘So?’ asked Mac.

  ‘So then he wants my passport and hotel address and I say that I wasn’t driving the hit-and-run car, and he says he knows that – he’s investigating an attempted homicide!’

  ‘Okay, mate, stay calm,’ said Mac, keeping his eyes on the Camry.

  Lance sounded close to losing it. ‘This was a murder?’

  ‘Not yet, mate,’ said Mac. ‘Did you give the Hawaii as your address?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lance.

  Mac pushed further. ‘You sweet with this cop?’

  ‘Yep, I think so.’

  ‘Good. I want you to walk out of there and go find a tourist bar, have a few beers, sit where you can see all the entries, buy your own drinks and try not to look at surveillance cameras, okay?’

  ‘Yep, sure,’ said Lance, sounding anything but.

  Mac could only hope that the kid would be okay. ‘I’ll call when I know the hotel’s not blown – and Lance?’

  ‘Yes, boss?’


  ‘If a good-looking bird wants to befriend you, and it seems too good to be true . . .’

  ‘Yeah, yeah – I know,’ said Lance, regaining his composure. ‘I’ll wait for your call.’

  ‘If you haven’t heard by midnight, go to Red Fallback.’

  ‘Got it,’ said Lance and rang off.

  Just west of the Hotel InterContinental the Camry suddenly lurched to the right of the westbound lanes and the scenario finally made sense.

  ‘They tailing someone,’ said Tranh.

  ‘Ask the driver to close up – thirty metres,’ said Mac, eyes now scanning the lanes ahead of the Camry.

  ‘So, what did Lance try to get out of you?’ said Mac as the taxi accelerated.

  ‘Tried to get me talk about myself and then talk about Saigon and then talk about what I’m doing with you.’

  ‘And?’ said Mac.

  ‘Two out of three ain’t very bad,’ said Tranh.

  ‘Well done, Mr Tranh – any clues from Mr Lance?’

  ‘He interested in Apricot,’ said Tranh. ‘But he referred to him two times as “they”.’

  ‘They?’ said Mac.

  ‘Yes, like Mr Apricot is with someone else.’

  The red Camry slowed and turned right into an area of affluent Western-style serviced apartments of the type that travelling executives and businesspeople rented when they were in Cambodia for more than a few weeks. The Camry pulled to the kerb in front of them and Tranh snapped a command at the cabbie, who pulled in about fifty metres back.

  Peering through the darkness, looking for the Chinese agents’ quarry, they saw a brief flash of light as a motorised garage door opened and a vehicle moved forwards under the four-storey residential building. They couldn’t make out the colour, but the shape of the vehicle was distinct.