Counter Attack

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Tranh?’

  ‘The Vietnamese driver I had in Phnom Penh,’ said Mac. ‘I think he was killed in the apartment building.’

  Sammy nodded. ‘We got his phone, but he didn’t die.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, I winged him after he pulled on me,’ said Sammy. ‘And he was taken by another crew.’

  ‘Dozsa?’

  ‘No,’ said Sammy, ‘locals, gangsters – they appeared at the entry doors, grabbed your driver and took off.’

  Mac was stunned by the revelation. ‘There was an ambulance – didn’t someone die?’

  ‘Yeah, it was a woman, an expat. She was waiting for the elevator and got between me and Tranh. It was an accident.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Mac, remembering the night and the woman taking her garbage out to the bins. She’d let Mac and Tranh into the building.

  ‘Two o’clock,’ said Scotty, pulling Mac to the right angle to see through the curtains.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mac, seeing the figure walking to the door of cottage 13.

  ‘It’s that cop from Saigon,’ said Scotty. ‘Loh Han, isn’t it?’

  ‘Loan,’ said Mac. ‘And yes, it is.’

  Chapter 61

  Running to the front door, Mac opened it slowly and stuck his head outside.

  ‘Psst,’ he said, trying to keep his voice down. ‘Captain Loan. Chanthe.’

  The captain had already turned away from him and was talking to the two local cops who walked across the garden with the manager.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Sammy.

  An engine roared to life, car doors slammed.

  ‘They’re leaving,’ said Scotty, and turning back into the cottage Mac saw his mentor grabbing an assault rifle from Sammy’s bag. ‘Just got into the car.’

  Following Scotty to the back door, Mac saw Sammy Chan, in standing marksman pose, about to unleash with his assault rifle.

  Mac yelled at him. ‘No! Leave it, Sammy!’

  Distracted, Sammy turned to Mac, who burst past Scotty and put a hand on the American’s weapon, pushing it down. ‘Not with the cops at the door, mate.’

  ‘Fuck – look,’ said Sammy, incredulous.

  An engine screamed and the green LandCruiser behind cottage 13 threw gravel as it accelerated out of the guest house campus.

  ‘I had ’em,’ said Sammy, his face telling of bad interrogation techniques.

  ‘No, you had twenty years in a Cambodian prison,’ said Mac. ‘And that’s all you had.’

  ‘Might want to put that away,’ said Scotty, nodding at Sammy’s rifle.

  As Sammy walked back into the cottage mumbling about Australian pussies, Captain Loan walked through the gap between the two cottages, looking stylish in her black pant suit.

  ‘Captain,’ said Mac, smiling. ‘You following me?’

  ‘No,’ said Loan, surprised. ‘I was going to interview the –’

  Turning to her right, she looked through the dust and listened to the LandCruiser’s tyres screeching as they hit the tarmac.

  ‘The neighbours?’ said Mac. ‘They just left – in a hell of a hurry, too.’

  ‘Neighbours?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mac. ‘Israeli boys in a green LandCruiser.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Loan, shouting at the local cops as she ran back to the manager’s office.

  Loan’s white Camry turned left, heading for Highway Seven’s southbound exit out of Stung Treng. She drove fast and Scotty did well to keep the car at a casual distance while doing a hundred and forty kilometres per hour as they flashed past the Stung Treng Ville sign, a massive circular-saw blade welcoming people to the provincial capital.

  ‘Think they know where they’re going?’ said Sammy from the back seat, breathing heavily.

  ‘She’s been on Dozsa for a week,’ said Mac, squinting to see her car through the heat and dust of the highway. ‘She’s got the Cambodian cops working for her – she should know more than us.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Scotty, jumping on the brakes and holding the car in a long sideways skid as they left the road and slid across dirt and gravel into bushes along a levee road.

  Sammy’s head bounced off the back of Mac’s seat. ‘What the fuck?’

  Gunning the engine, Scotty drove the car through the scraping branches and onto the levee road, where he stopped and waited.

  ‘What are we – ?’ asked Sammy, just as the white Camry flashed past, engine screaming as it headed back to Stung Treng.

  Pulling back onto the highway, Scotty floored the accelerator and they raced through the morning traffic, taking the third lane down the middle as they flashed past trucks, buses, scooters and donkey carts.

  ‘There she is,’ said Mac, seeing the white Camry in the distance, pulling wild overtaking manoeuvres. Losing sight of Loan’s car as they approached the town limits, Scotty hunched over the steering wheel looking left and right for a side road.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to himself. ‘Fucking come on.’

  As they went past a dusty road to the right, Mac looked down it and saw a procession of donkey carts and a tractor that looked one model away from the iron-wheeled traction engines. The white Camry was almost hidden in its own dust cloud, between two tractors.

  ‘Back here, Scotty,’ said Mac.

  Throwing the car into a sliding donut at a hundred and ten kph, Scotty lost the tail in the road-side dirt and hammered the throttle as they were thrown around like a tossed salad. Truck horns sounded and air brakes hissed as Scotty brought the car around to face the opposite direction, tyres squealing.

  Scotty floored it as they turned in to the side road.

  Realising he’d been holding his breath, Mac made himself breathe out. They hit a crest and saw the Camry about half a mile in front of them. Mac saw something else, just as Sammy saw the same thing.

  ‘Airport,’ said the American, pointing between the front seats.

  ‘Should have been the first place we tried,’ said Scotty.

  Seeing the plane tails in the distance, Mac decided the Israelis would be trying to get on a plane and would turn their guns on Loan and her cops. Mac had seen what Dozsa’s firepower looked like and as he gripped his Nokia he tossed up whether he should call Captain Loan. What did he owe her? Anything? A ten-second phone call?

  ‘This cop could be useful to us,’ said Mac.

  They flew over another crest – all four tyres leaving the ground – and Scotty swerved around a cart as they touched down, leaning on the horn.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘I should warn her about Dozsa’s people.’

  ‘Warn?’ said Sammy, leaning between them. ‘Who? The cop?’

  ‘Loan’s no use to us dead,’ said Mac, scrolling down his con- tacts list.

  ‘No cops, right, Scotty?’ said Sammy. ‘We’re cleanskins.’ Undeclared intel operators were supposed to go unnoticed when in-country.

  Scotty lost the tail of the car in the right-hand ditch and wrestled the machine back into line with three fishtails.

  Scotty finally spoke. ‘This Loan – is it personal, Macca?’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Mac.

  ‘I mean, she’s a good sort, and she’s your type.’

  ‘I don’t have a type,’ said Mac.

  ‘Sure you do,’ said Scotty. ‘Tall, sexy, don’t like men.’

  ‘Watch it,’ said Mac.

  Rounding a left-hand bend, Scotty hit the brakes, putting the car into a 360-degree spin and then into the ditch with a bang. Ahead, three figures were out of the white Camry, moving carefully towards the green LandCruiser parked fifty metres down the road.

  The heat shimmered through the white dust and Mac tried to open his door, which was jammed against the side of the ditch.

 
Following Scotty out the driver’s door, they stood on the road and watched as the three figures from the Camry split and ran to opposite sides of the road. A wall of automatic gunfire plunged into the Camry, its tyres blowing out and a gas-tank fire starting after five seconds of the onslaught.

  Mac saw Loan and her two cops trying to approach the defunct car as the green LandCruiser moved on.

  ‘Let’s get this car out,’ said Scotty, walking back to the ditch.

  Sammy and Mac pushed and then they were back on the road, the transmission now featuring a loud scraping sound.

  Swerving past the burning Camry, Mac ducked down in his seat to avoid Loan seeing him. As they cleared the fire, Scotty held his foot to the floor and they sat in stressed silence as the car limped and ground its way towards the airport, not managing more than a hundred and ten kph.

  Scotty pulled into the dirt car park of the airport as smoke drifted into the car from the floor. There were two other cars parked, but neither of them was a green LandCruiser.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t the airport,’ said Scotty, cruising slowly around the car park and trying to look in the glass front doors. The place looked deserted.

  ‘I’ll check,’ said Mac, opening his door before the car had stopped.

  Limping up the concrete apron to the front doors, he pushed through carefully into the coolness. It looked like an abandoned factory cafeteria, with floor-to-ceiling windows at the far side, looking over the shimmering tarmac.

  Taking his gun in hand, Mac entered and realised a middle-aged woman was sitting behind a counter, but with nothing to sell.

  Mac smiled, hiding his gun. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Good morning, mister,’ she said.

  ‘Any flights this morning?’

  ‘No, mister.’

  ‘No scheduled flights today?’

  ‘Scheduled flight, sometimes,’ said the woman, nodding. ‘It depend.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mac, smiling. He’d spent so long getting those sorts of dual responses in South-East Asia that it didn’t worry him anymore. If Garvs had been talking to the woman, he’d be arcing up by now, trying to nail her down to a real answer and suspecting her of loyalties to Brother No. 1.

  Turning back to the entrance, he saw an old hangar on the other side of the tarmac and some movement around it.

  Walking to the windows, he cupped his hands against the glass and peered out. Something was spinning in that hangar. He focused harder, wishing he had his binos. Then he saw it: figures moving away from a green vehicle parked at the side of the hangar, a sign over the entrance saying North Air.

  Sprinting for the front doors, Mac got to the car and found Sammy leaning on the bonnet and Scotty on his knees, looking under the car.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Mac, opening the boot and pulling out the M4s.

  ‘Car’s rooted,’ said Scotty, standing.

  A puddle grew under the front axle.

  ‘Come on,’ said Mac, throwing one of the assault rifles to Scotty. Leading them around the south side of the terminal, through an alley and out onto the tarmac, Mac pointed to where the Friendship was emerging from the hangar, its props spinning with a whining sound.

  Sammy ran, but slowed as the Friendship straightened and gained speed with its opened throttles.

  Mac rested his hands on his knees as the aircraft flashed past with its signature drone and climbed into the sky.

  ‘He’ll keep,’ said Scotty, gasping for air.

  ‘Oh really?’ said Mac, as he caught a flash of Dozsa’s face in a window.

  It was an expression he hadn’t yet seen in the Israeli: Joel Dozsa was laughing.

  Chapter 62

  Scotty’s face had turned bright purple from the run across the airfield. ‘Well, we fucked that up.’

  Mac eyed the hangar as his chest heaved. ‘Let’s check the Cruiser.’

  Scotty hit the phone and arranged the rental car people to deliver a new car as Mac walked to the green LandCruiser. Checking the vehicle for wires and bombs, Sammy gave it the okay and they started their search.

  Scotty lit a smoke and headed for the control tower to see if the pilot had logged a flight plan.

  The LandCruiser was clean and Mac felt very tired. He was now sure Dozsa had an alternative way into the North Korean launch systems for their missile tests, but the only way of stopping it had just flown out of Cambodia.

  Slamming the driver’s door, he moved away to stand in the shade. As Sammy came around to join him, Mac noticed something on the vehicle. Moving to the Toyota, he kneeled and put his hand out. There was a piece of yellow paper sticking out of the bottom of the driver’s door.

  Opening the door, Mac peeled off a yellow post-it note with black ballpoint writing on it. It looked like a code: 555M.

  ‘Mean anything to you?’ said Mac, passing it over.

  Sammy made a face and did a search on his smart phone.

  ‘It’s a bus route in Chennai,’ he said. ‘And it’s a golf club.’

  Scotty jogged towards them as a green open-topped jeep entered the airfield beside the terminal and motored towards them.

  ‘Air traffic says the log shows Phnom Penh airport,’ said Scotty, panting.

  ‘And then where?’ said Sammy.

  ‘That’s all they have to log,’ said Scotty, turning to see the approaching police jeep.

  Sammy keyed his phone and walked away, talking into the device.

  Captain Loan stepped out of the jeep with a wry smile, staring at Mac through Wayfarer sunnies. ‘You following me, Mr Richard?’

  ‘Nah, mate,’ he said. ‘Just enjoying the fresh air.’

  The Cambodian cops searched the LandCruiser and Loan walked around it, stopping and nodding at the assault rifles leaning against the vehicle.

  ‘Don’t tell me – it’s a Cambodian matter, right?’ said Loan.

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘I can see if the officers would like to take this up as a Cambodian matter.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’

  ‘We need to talk,’ said Loan, not looking at Mac.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, as she led him by the arm away from the LandCruiser and the other men.

  ‘I’ve given you lots of freedom, Mr Richard,’ she said, a harder tone in her voice.

  ‘Yeah, and I gave you an eyewitness account of Quirk’s murder,’ said Mac, tired and annoyed.

  ‘I released Luc to you,’ said Loan. ‘I expected some cooperation in return – this is an Australian murder I’m investigating.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Mac, fishing in his pocket. ‘Found this falling out the Toyota door as we pulled up.’

  ‘Where’s Dozsa?’ said Loan, taking the post-it.

  ‘In a North Air Friendship, flight plan says to Phnom Penh.’

  Pulling out her phone, Loan issued an order in Vietnamese and signed off as she looked at the note.

  ‘Singapore,’ she said. ‘Changi Airport.’

  ‘What?’ said Mac, grabbing the note from her.

  ‘W-S-S-S is the code for Changi,’ said Loan, turning the note the correct way up.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mac, handing back the note.

  ‘We need to talk,’ said Loan.

  ‘Give me a couple of hours,’ said Mac.

  ‘Make it one – and don’t leave town,’ she said, heading for the control tower.

  They spoke about the post-it note as they shovelled down fish and rice at a Stung Treng restaurant that overlooked the river.

  ‘Dozsa’s dropping off something in Changi, or he’s meeting someone,’ said Mac. ‘Either way, Singapore is all we have.’

  ‘He leaves an entire US currency printing press up there in the hills, and fucks off to Singapore?’ said Scotty, flushed with t
he heat. ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘The currency was just one part of the plan with Pao Peng,’ said Sammy. ‘It may have been opportunistic and it will be very damaging if we can’t plug all of it. But the HARPAC operation is the heart of it – Pao Peng needs a nationalistic cause to fire up the Chinese.’

  ‘And what better than a fight with the Japs,’ said Scotty.

  ‘So it all comes back to these managed funds?’ said Mac.

  ‘But you knew that – that’s how come Singapore, right?’ said Sammy, drinking his beer and casing the room.

  ‘How come Singapore what?’ said Mac.

  ‘Well, you started your involvement in all this through Singapore.’

  ‘I started with Jim Quirk,’ said Mac, looking to Scotty for guidance. ‘In Saigon.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sammy, waving it away. ‘Thought we were talking about something else.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You know – the whole Ray Hu thing,’ said Sammy, checking for email on his phone.

  Freezing mid-mouthful, Mac looked at Scotty and then back at Sammy. Reaching over, he grabbed the phone out of Sammy’s hand and flipped it over his shoulder.

  ‘Hey,’ said the American, as the device bounced on the boards behind him.

  ‘Focus for a sec,’ said Mac. ‘Ray Hu?’

  ‘Well, yeah. That’s what you were doing at Ray’s house, right?’

  A vein bounced in Mac’s left temple. ‘You were there?’

  ‘Calm down, tough guy,’ said Sammy, leaning back. ‘Ray was of interest to us and I had him under surveillance – I didn’t whack him.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So HARPAC was buying all these companies that make the transceiver components in routers – we thought it was aimed at the US, but it turned out the Highland Pacific fund was the one making inroads into the Milstar satellites. Harbour Pacific was different.’

  ‘Go back two steps,’ said Mac. ‘Harbour Pacific?’

  ‘Harbour Pacific is a Singapore-based fund,’ said Sammy, like it was obvious. ‘It was run by Ray Hu.’

  The skin was being stretched over Mac’s temples like a kettle drum. ‘Ray?’

  ‘Don’t sound so amazed,’ said Sammy. ‘What page are you on?’