Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘What’s it got to do with Quirk?’

  ‘He was vetting the Harbour Pacific fund along with its sister fund, Highland Pacific.’

  ‘So where’s the report?’ said Mac.

  ‘I’ve read it – he’s fudged a lot of the connections, downplayed the kind of things that you and I would be suspicious about.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the fact that if you added a clone computer to the assets that Harbour Pacific controls, you wouldn’t just listen to what the North Koreans were doing, you’d be inside the Korean defence infrastructure – you’d be able to operate their C and C systems . . .’

  ‘Which control the missile launches.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Grimshaw.

  They stared at one another.

  ‘Quirk signed off on Harbour Pacific too?’ said Mac.

  ‘Sure did – I think he was being blackmailed by Dozsa.’

  ‘Over what?’

  ‘Outing his wife as a spy for Israel,’ said Grimshaw, in a tone that assumed everyone knew this information.

  ‘She was the bait?’

  ‘We think Dozsa had evidence from his time in Australia – he and McHugh had a love affair and it seems he got her to tell him things. McHugh and Quirk were ambitious people who couldn’t stand the thought of being accused of espionage – Dozsa played them perfectly.’

  ‘So when the rest of the Central Committee hesitates about attacking Japan, we have General Pao Peng assuming command?’

  ‘Sure, having softened up a billion Chinese with his ultranationalist propaganda.’

  ‘Propaganda?’ said Mac. ‘You’re saying all that stuff about Chinese honour in Nanching and Manchuria is produced by Pao Peng’s people?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Grimshaw. ‘That material is never organic – some of Pao Peng’s biggest supporters are newspaper and radio moguls.’

  ‘Smart,’ said Mac.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve been following Pao Peng since they made him a general in ’97,’ said Grimshaw. ‘When his fellow students at Staff College were reading Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, Pao Peng was reading Goebbels and MacArthur.’

  ‘Douglas MacArthur?’ said Mac.

  ‘MacArthur was the US Army’s first public relations officer,’ said Grimshaw. ‘He popularised “hearts and minds” – the idea that books and newspapers are as powerful as bombs and bullets. Pao Peng’s links to the media are no accident.’

  ‘So what now?’ said Mac.

  ‘You rescue your Aussies – I need to see that SD card.’

  ‘But eventually it all leads back to these Pacific funds, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Grimshaw, grabbing his backpack. ‘It’s always the money men.’

  Chapter 56

  Outboard motors gurgled in the still, tropical air as Mac loaded his kit into the hired boat – two hundred US for a night on the fifty-foot double-hull. On the Kratie wharf, Scotty spoke into a phone, making final arrangements with Canberra.

  ‘Ready, mister?’ said the boat owner, a tallish local named Li.

  ‘One call, then we go,’ said Mac, pointing at his Nokia.

  ‘No worry,’ said Li, twirling the radio in the cockpit and coming up with a Thai rock star’s version of ‘Like a Virgin’.

  Leaping into the boat, Scotty puffed from the effort of jumping.

  ‘Gotta knock off the booze,’ he said, poking at the two black kit bags. ‘This is it? Thought the Yanks would travel with more than that.’

  ‘Couple of assault rifles and some flash-bangs,’ said Mac. ‘And Grimshaw didn’t want to give up that much, either.’

  ‘It’s just us, mate,’ said Scotty, reaching for his smokes but catching a look from Li. ‘Sandy’s operation is totally Defence and we can’t even look at those Team Four boys, let alone bring them along for support.’

  ‘Tobin said this?’

  ‘Tobin, quoting Karl Berquist,’ said Scotty. ‘Defence is a loop with the PM all of a sudden.’

  ‘Tobin tell you to leave Urquhart and Lance?’ said Mac.

  ‘You kidding?’ said Scotty. ‘Firm doesn’t need to know about this – I just told him we might need Team Four for a spot of bother and he warned me off like I was asking his daughter to go on a P&O cruise.’

  ‘So we’re it?’ said Mac, as the stinking river slapped against the hull. ‘You feeling fit, old man?’

  ‘Not bad for a desk jockey.’ Scotty lit the smoke and held it over the edge.

  Mac’s Nokia trilled and he answered. Clicking his fingers at Scotty, he repeated the coordinates from the latest fix on the micro-transmitter sitting in Lance’s stomach. Scotty scribbled on a map.

  ‘Thanks, Charles – owe ya,’ said Mac, signing off.

  Mac looked down at the plots, illuminated by the wharf floodlights: the three fixes on that transmitter had Lance moving down the Mekong, about ten miles south of Kratie.

  ‘Know this?’ said Mac to Li, pointing to the plots on the map.

  ‘Sure, mister – ’bout fif’ minute.’

  ‘Fifteen?’

  ‘Sure, mister,’ said Li. ‘Go now?’

  ‘Yep, let’s go,’ said Mac, watching Li’s offsider – a boy of about sixteen called Johnny – cast off the lines and jump into the boat.

  Mac’s adrenaline surged as Li eased on the power from the twin Evinrudes and the bow lifted into the Mekong. The dank smell and the darkness enveloped him as they slipped into the downstream of one of the oldest commercial highways in the world.

  Getting the boat onto a plane, Li sat in the skipper’s stool and navigated with a small headlight mounted on the right bow while Mac searched in the gear bag. Pulling out a tub of eye-black, he dabbed three fingertips of his right hand into the greasy dark goo, and smoothed it across his face and forehead in streaks.

  Scotty lit another smoke. ‘Look like one of them Maoris.’

  ‘Your turn,’ said Mac, dipping his fingers into the pot and streaking Scotty’s face with black greasepaint.

  Pulling two hats from the bag, Mac offered one to Scotty.

  ‘These cricket hats?’ said Scotty, who’d gone straight from basic training to military intelligence back in the seventies.

  ‘Break up the shape of the head,’ said Mac. ‘We recognise humans from their gait, and the shape of the head. There’s a few tricks we can play with the gait, but hiding the melon is much easier.’

  ‘It works?’ said Scotty, turning the American boonie hat in his hands.

  ‘If it gives you half a second, it’s working,’ said Mac, smiling at his repetition of what Banger Jordan had told them in the Royal Marines: ‘A good soldier takes two seconds to aim and take an accurate shot; if you buy yourself half a second, you win and the other cunt’s dead.’

  Banger had fought in the Falklands, and had been out of uniform for six years when Mac was under him at Poole. The rumour was he’d been doing assignments for British SIS during his absence, a rumour the Geordie had laughed off with jokes about how James Bond never took a crap and called it shite.

  Mac remembered getting the feeling from Jordan that the more a man had committed the ultimate sin, the less he wanted people to know that about him. Pulling a box of condoms from the bag, Mac watched the lights of the fishing villages slip by, and realised the circle he’d taken hadn’t started and finished in the Firm. His circle was a soldier’s journey: he was becoming Banger Jordan.

  ‘The fuck are they for?’ asked Scotty, pointing at the condoms. ‘You stopping off for a root?’

  Planting the M4 carbine between his knees, Mac tore the Durex packet open with his teeth and rolled the rubber down over the muzzle, tying it off against the barrel.

  ‘It’s what the British military calls waterproofing,’ said Mac as he handed it to Scotty. ‘They
don’t care if you march all day through a swamp, in the rain – your weapon must work when it has to work.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Scotty as they scythed through the dark waters of the Nine Dragons. ‘What’s the plan?’

  The lights of the river cruiser blinked through the haze on the Mekong, four hundred metres downstream. It was an eighty-foot diesel-powered Mekong bus of the kind that plied the river between small towns and villages – this was not a tourist vessel.

  Mac watched it from the cockpit, using the captain’s binos and issuing hushed commands.

  ‘Okay, boss,’ said Mac, not taking his eyes off the river cruiser. ‘Cut power.’

  Mac had just finished his final call to Grimshaw – the micro-transmitter was emitting from right beneath them. There couldn’t be any other target than the craft in front of them, the number K 4217 just visible on the bow.

  ‘Know this ship?’ said Mac, as Li cut the engines to a burbling idle.

  Taking his field-glasses from Mac, Li peered into the darkness, the double-decked wooden cruiser becoming more obvious as it chugged past the floodlights of a general store which had a 1960s Elf bowser sticking out of its decking.

  ‘I not know this one, mister,’ said Li, shrugging. ‘Much like this. Many.’

  ‘Okay – cut the lights.’

  ‘No, mister,’ said Captain Li, shaking his head. ‘Water police – no good.’

  Placing two US fifty-dollar bills on the cockpit dashboard, Mac saw them hoovered up and the lights go down on the boat.

  ‘Captain Li, that’s for you if you stick around, do as I say,’ said Mac, pulling four more of the bills out of his plastic Ziploc bag. ‘Two hundred US – all you have to do is motor alongside, and ask the other captain if he saw the flares.’

  ‘And when he say “no”, I say I saw the red flares – are you in distress?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Mac. ‘From the first word you speak, to the point you stand off, I must have one hundred and twenty seconds. I need two minutes, okay?’

  ‘Sure, mister,’ said Li, gulping.

  ‘And then stand off and wait until we’re finished, okay?’

  ‘Okay, mister.’ Li avoided Mac’s eyes.

  ‘And Li?’ said Mac, grabbing the field-glasses and having another look.

  ‘Yes, mister?’

  ‘Keep the kid out of it, okay?’

  Sitting in the aft-decks with Scotty, Mac made a final run-through as he fished the SCUBA face mask from the bag.

  ‘So, no heroes, okay, Scotty?’ said Mac, stripping to his underwear and wiping the eye-black over his thighs, arms and chest. ‘You only show your head with that carbine if the goons on this cruiser don’t give me two minutes.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Scotty, his moustache twitching from his blacked-out face.

  Handing the pot of black paint to Scotty, Mac asked him to do his back.

  ‘Look,’ said Scotty as he smeared the grease on Mac’s shoulder blades, ‘I don’t know if –’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ said Mac, buckling a webbing belt over his hips and slipping a condom over the barrel of the SIG before holstering it.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Scotty, his hands shaking as he finished the eye-black. ‘It’s okay for you.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ said Mac, doing his diaphragm breathing exercises as he reverse-slung the M4 over his shoulders so the muzzle pointed at his left ankle.

  ‘Well, you know . . .’ said Scotty, averting his eyes.

  Calling Li to the back of the boat, Mac synchronised their watches and gave himself a ten-minute mission clock: after ten minutes, Mac would wait until Li started talking and would take his one hundred and twenty seconds from then.

  Holding his G-Shock up to the other two, Mac counted three and they clicked their countdowns at the same time. He felt cold and focused, his mind empty of emotion, his skin a mountain range of goose bumps even as the humidity sat on him like warm dew. He felt fear but not the way he felt it as a teenager asking a girl for a dance at the surf club ball. This fear was a bottled, contained sensation that he used as fuel, and his trepidation was about completing the steps he’d created in his mind, not about pain or failure.

  ‘See you soon,’ said Mac, leaning backwards into the water on the starboard side and sliding into the ancient shallows of the Mekong.

  Mac swam underwater for seventy seconds, emerging slowly into filthy flotsam about fifty metres downriver from Li’s boat. Taking gulps of air as he trod water, assessing the ground, he ducked under again and swam a line that would take him to the starboard side of the cruiser, the side closest to the riverbank. When Li arrived, Mac wanted all the talk to be on the opposite side of the boat.

  After two more underwater swims, Mac tore off his face mask and let it drop to the bottom of the river. The cruiser was about fifty metres away and had lights burning on board. Expanding his diaphragm, getting as much oxygen as possible, Mac watched a figure on the upper decks of the cruiser smoking a cigarette just behind the port side of the wheelhouse.

  Looking at his G-Shock, Mac saw the countdown had reached 4.11 – he had some time to play with.

  Something hit him on the left shoulder blade and he spun around in time to see a grey-bellied rat float by – a welcome change from the more common floaters in the Mekong.

  Another flame flared on the starboard top decks of the cruiser. Then the two goons were laughing and joking across the life-raft boxes. They looked like the PLA cadres from the Dozsa compound, their rifles not evident. The countdown hit 3.46 and the goon on the starboard side – the side Mac had decided to target – unzipped himself and pissed into the river.

  Slipping under the water, Mac moved closer, using the blind spot directly behind the stern-mounted rudder to bring him into the craft. As he closed on the thick steel-plated rudder he felt the screw churning the water below the heavy steerage planks.

  Reaching for the rudder, Mac mentally ticked off the approach stage from his to-do list and thought about boarding the craft without being seen and without slipping onto the prop; the screws on the older boats were under the stern’s hull, and generally weren’t a danger, but total fiasco was always just a slip away.

  As his fingers searched for a hold, the air whooshed through his nostrils and he gasped as he was lifted out of the water and thumped head-first into the curved stern boards beside the rudder.

  Stunned and disoriented as he sank through the murky waters, Mac coughed up a lungful of polluted water and felt his body go into panic.

  Spluttering, his arms thrashing, Mac popped to the surface like a child out of a dream and grabbed for a hold on the hull of the craft. He’d been knocked down the starboard side of the ship, and as he fought for breath he heard the Chinese soldiers yelling and laughing. Digging himself into the slippery, lichen-covered hull as he vomited the river swill, Mac trod water with an egg-beater action, reaching for the SIG as the voices came to the rail twenty feet above.

  Pulling the SIG up to his face as his left hand lost traction on the mossy hull, he slipped down again, his feet reaching too close to the spinning screw. With all of his strength, Mac pulled himself back to the surface with handfuls of slimy green river moss. Raising the handgun – comical with its condom over the muzzle – Mac saw the Chinese soldiers pointing at something moving in the water near the riverbank.

  Following their gaze and praying they didn’t look down, he saw a pale-coloured Irrawaddy dolphin flip over and playfully swim backwards. The world’s rarest dolphin, trained now to play with European tourists, had tried to give him a ride, not knowing about the crown jewels.

  Panting in agony against the hull of the ship, Mac struggled to control his breathing as he watched to see if the beast would come back for another Nutcracker dance. His G-Shock said 1.18 on the countdown as he cursed every Danish backpacker who�
�d ever encouraged these animals to commune with humans.

  The dolphin did its squeaky little bark as it came back for another swim and the peaceful night was rent by automatic rifle fire.

  Pressing himself hard against the slippery hull, Mac dug his fingernails into a gap between the planks and waited to die. As the gunfire abated, Mac allowed himself to look over his shoulder, the smell of blood and cordite floating over the oily river making him feel sick.

  The dark stain of mammal blood slicked the water twenty feet from Mac’s perch and he could see pieces of shredded dolphin floating away on the current.

  The Chinese soldiers laughed and a ciggie butt flew end over end, its glow extinguishing in the blood slick.

  Breathing deep for composure and trying to ignore the pain in his groin, Mac moved back to the rudder and looked at his G-Shock. It showed 1.04 minutes until Go.

  Chapter 57

  Pulling on the boonie hat, Mac holstered the SIG handgun and climbed the rudder – a job made easy by the bands of iron wrapped horizontally around it. Lifting his eyes carefully over the transom he cased a dimly lit lower deck which would house a galley, the captain’s state room and probably a guest state room. He’d had this chat with Li: the crew’s cabins would be below decks and the holds and cargo decks were always forward of the wheelhouse. When locals travelled between towns on these ships, they sat cross-legged on the top decks and on the poop deck at the stern.

  The soldiers talked on the upper decks, hidden from Mac’s view. He simply wanted to search the cabins and state rooms. If he was discovered, he’d remove the threat.

  Climbing over the railing, Mac eased himself to the warm wooden decking and froze, listening for sounds as the water dripped off him. Tearing the condom off the SIG, he reached to a pocket on the back of the webbing belt and extracted a suppressor.

  Moving along the port side of the covered deck, he stepped through an open hatch into a passage that led from one side of the ship to the other with a companionway dropping to the below decks.

  Two doors faced the corridor. The state rooms, guessed Mac. Opening the first, he pushed his face in and saw the captain’s suite. A low-watt bulb cast a yellow glow over a functional cabin with a single cot, a wardrobe and a desk.