Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike

by Mark Abernethy

  Mac saw her as he was halfway down the Raffl es front steps. The other tail was a late-twenties Anglo or Euro brunette in a burgundy skirt suit, standing next to a car pretending to be on the phone. Mac continued down the steps and paused at the forecourt, looked directly at the girl and feigned surprise at being made. Running around the side of the building, through the gardens, he strode into the courtyard where he’d been with Suzi and Benny the night before and then let himself into the side alcove of the Raffl es lobby. Moving forward quietly, behind a porter’s trolley, Mac scanned the vast area, thankful for the air-con. To his left he could see the retreating form of the male tail, the large wood and glass doors swishing behind him.

  Taking a deep breath, Mac walked across the lobby and into the restaurant, smiled at the maitre d’ and resumed his seat.

  The eggs and bacon were still hot.

  Freddi picked up on the fi rst ring when he redialled.

  ‘How are the kids?’ asked Mac.

  ‘They’re great - it’s their dad who get annoy.’

  Mac chuckled.

  ‘So, where are you, McQueen?’ asked Freddi.

  ‘Surabaya.’

  ‘Just seen it on the Weather Channel - is it true, what they say?’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ said Mac, amused that Freddi was such a good operator. ‘A little west of there. So, mate - what’s up?’

  ‘Thought you might tell me.’

  ‘Maybe we should tell each other, eh Fred?’

  ‘Sure, so where are you?’ asked Freddi, not giving up.

  Mac sighed. ‘On the Peninsula. But I wanted to know about the object, from the hotel?’

  ‘Yeah - nice call. We got a number.’

  ‘Anything from it?’

  ‘Got an interview.’

  ‘And?’ said Mac.

  ‘Going to have a look.’

  ‘Where?’ spat Mac, not able to hide his interest.

  ‘In Archipelago, yeah?’

  ‘ Shit, Freddi!’

  ‘Yeah, McQueen?’

  ‘Okay, I’m in Singers.’

  ‘Behaving yourself?’

  ‘Got a tail but they’re standing off.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Look Euro but probably Americans, judging by the girl’s make-up.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  Mac shrugged, looked around the restaurant. ‘Beats me. So, we still chasing Hassan?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘Don’t know about we.’

  ‘Come on, mate. You might be interested in what I’m on to.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mac, wanting to be back on the trail.

  ‘Guys might not want it like that.’

  ‘But Fred, the guys don’t know what I bring to this, right?’

  ‘What do you bring?’

  Mac had one eye on the restaurant entrance, his mind racing. ‘Can you get me on board?’

  ‘I can try.’

  ‘Second me? You guys have done it before.’

  ‘Maybe, McQueen, but I don’t decide that.’

  ‘I know, but you can sell it.’

  ‘Okay - I try.’

  Mac ran through the conversation with Benny but referred to Hassan as ‘our guest’ and JI as ‘the associates’. He ended with the bit about the previous transaction between the al-Qaeda account and Hassan’s account happening ten days before the Bali bombings, and the current one - only the second ever - occurring two days ago.

  ‘You’ve got the fi les?’ asked Freddi, now on high alert.

  ‘Yeah, whole hard drive of them.’

  ‘And you can get to them?’

  ‘In my pocket, Freddi.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Freddi, ‘hang on and I get back.’

  They hung up and Mac poured more coffee. The double team hadn’t reappeared, which meant they were handing over to another crew or they were waiting outside and would simply walk up and ask to have a chat.

  The phone trilled, Mac picking up before the fi rst ring had ended.

  ‘Can’t detour to Singapore,’ said Freddi immediately.

  ‘Can we meet up?’

  ‘About one o’clock, your time,’ said Freddi.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The place.’

  ‘The place?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, McQueen - that place.’

  Ari was waiting in the foyer of the Riau when Mac got back from meeting with Benny. He looked the same in the face but was now dressed more like a controller. But when he stood up, smiled and offered his hand, Mac saw that Ari Scharansky still had that bull neck and big arms; still a little mad, still a very dangerous individual.

  ‘Ari! How’s it going?’

  ‘Morning, McQueen,’ said Ari with a fond smile as they shook.

  ‘Should have shouted me breakfast, mate. Would have saved me fi fty bucks.’

  Ari winced. ‘Shit! Breakfast at the Raffl es? You must have well-trained accountants in offi ce, yes?’

  Mac laughed. He’d never had a single expenses claim in his career that hadn’t had at least one item queried or denied. ‘So, Ari. How did you fi nd … ?’ Mac’s question petered out as his eyes took in Miss Rasmi’s front desk, with the security grille down and Closed sign on it. Shaking his head, Mac looked back at his mate from Mossad.

  ‘Know what the trouble is with a hotelier who can be bought off, Ari?’

  Ari smirked, shook his head.

  ‘They can be bought off.’

  Ari laughed and they wandered out into the heat of Singapore and strolled towards the bay.

  Ari gave his mobile number and Mac input it into his Nokia.

  They talked about Kuta, had a few laughs about the old days, and Ari admitted he was now a controller, running fi eld people. That explained Mac’s mild confusion with the tail team. They looked Euro but the woman had that Israeli habit of heavy American make-up

  - the whole liquid foundation and full gloss lipstick effect.

  They stopped by a fountain in the park - a good place to defeat long-range listening devices - and Ari pulled out his smokes, lit one, looking serious.

  ‘So, McQueen, what is happening?’

  ‘Great weather we’re having.’

  Ari laughed, his big-boned face lighting up.

  ‘Mate,’ said Mac. ‘You’re after something, right?’

  Ari nodded, clearly eager to get on with the job.

  ‘So just ask it and I’ll tell you if I can help,’ said Mac.

  ‘Okay - what did you think about these documents?’ asked Ari.

  Mac deadpanned him.

  ‘You know,’ said Ari. ‘These Bennelong fi les. In iDisk.’

  Mac smiled. The Israelis weren’t too bad when they got going. It’s just that they weren’t as good as Benny - didn’t know what to do with those sale documents and acquisition manifests.

  ‘We might have to swap some information, yeah Ari?’ said Mac, raising the expected quid pro quo at the heart of all inter-agency cooperation.

  ‘Sure,’ said Ari, fl icking his ciggie as he looked around for eyes. An old Chinese lady in a black tracksuit was doing tai chi poses under a tree and Ari stared at her as he torched another smoke.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I made of those documents, mate,’ smiled Mac.

  ‘But I need to know something from you that is in the past. Can’t hurt you now.’

  Ari shrugged, chewed his gum. His sandy hair was still cut the way it had been in the Soviet and then Russian military. Mac had searched the fi les on Ari and found that before he moved to Israel and Mossad he had been GRU Spetsnaz - a special forces operator within the Russian military intelligence organisation. GRU Spetsnaz infi ltrated their own people into President Amin’s bodyguard before they invaded Afghanistan in 1979. GRU Spetsnaz operators were crafty, dangerous people and Mac had to remind himself of that even when Ari was horsing around.

  ‘Remember Kuta in ‘02, how you knew that Hassan had brought a mini-n
uke to town? You were certain it had been used in the Sari Club, right?’

  Ari shrugged and looked away in the international sign for yes.

  Mac thought about his next question. ‘So how did you know that Hassan had a second device?’

  Ari sucked on his smoke. ‘Okay, but then we talking about iDisk, yeah?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mac.

  ‘We know the fucking Pakistanis had two mini-nuke,’ he snarled, fl icking his smoke into the fountain, ‘because maybe they are thieves, fuck their mothers.’

  Mac stared at him, astonished. ‘Hassan stole two nukes from Israel?!’

  Ari kicked a stone that wasn’t there.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Ari,’ said Mac.

  ‘I know,’ sneered Ari, the smoke slowly drifting out of his mouth.

  ‘I am saying this same words exact.’

  CHAPTER 44

  The Piper Navajo hugged the Malaysian coastline as they fl ew north.

  Benny had arranged to get Mac to Idi, and Mac was using the down time to think through what was going on. Ari’s revelations had made sense but they still came as a shock to Mac. It was now clear why Ari had been so adamant back in ‘02 that there was another device somewhere in Indonesia. He also now had a better understanding of why Ari - working for the most paranoid and uncooperative intelligence organisation outside of the Chinese MSS - had been so keen to work with Mac. Ari had needed to stay close to the BAIS pursuit of Hassan, but the Israelis couldn’t operate in Indonesia or Malaysia, and consequently they had no in-country intelligence cooperation agreements in those countries. ASIS did, though, and that’s where Ari had successfully tried to pitch himself, riding on Mac’s Aussie back.

  Mac thought through the wider ramifi cations. The Pakistanis, led by Hassan - a former ISI spook - had heisted two Dimona mini-nukes? It was hugely audacious stuff and explained why Mossad hadn’t simply put hits on the Pakistanis. Killing Hassan and Gorilla wouldn’t lead them to the second device. It had to be a search and seizure, almost like a police action. There might have been something else at play. Was Mossad treading carefully because the Pakistanis were still being protected by US intelligence? If the CIA had any hand in this it was going to end in tears. It always did when the Yanks played God.

  Ari’s admission had increased Mac’s paranoia but it had also vindicated him in front of someone like Atkins. Not only were mini-nukes real, but starting in the mid-1960s they’d seen action as US

  military SADMs, or Special Atomic Demolition Munitions, all the way through till the end of the Cold War. The SADM was a seventy-two kilogram cylinder, not much different to a mid-sized fi re extinguisher bottle, and while the full yield was slightly less than one kiloton, it could be dialled down to 0.01.

  Far from being the stuff of conspiracy theories, mini-nukes were actually highly practical weapons that had been developed so soldiers and frogmen could deploy them with little training. They had code-keys on them and an anti-tamper protocol called a Limited Try Lock.

  But as long as you had a code, anyone who could operate a Nokia phone could deploy a mini-nuke. They were so useful that the Israeli Dimona facility had been producing plutonium ‘pits’ since the 1980s and had stockpiled about four hundred of their own mini-nukes.

  One of the things playing on Mac’s mind since establishing there was defi nitely a second device was the devastation it could wreak.

  A mini-nuke was so portable, so easy to deploy and so powerful that there were few places it couldn’t be used. Kuta in ‘02 may have been a proof-of-concept - the real attack could be on Jakarta, KL or Singapore.

  Or a city in Australia. As Suzi had said, Australia was already on JI’s hit list, under the auspices of Mantiqi Four.

  The scientists at Dimona made standard plutonium pits for their mini-nukes but used differing sizes and mixes of the booster fuel. This allowed a special forces frogman to dial up to a full three-kiloton yield, or dial down to a localised blast that would fl atten a small building. The booster fuel was a mix of tritium and deuterium which allowed a very small amount of Plutonium 239 to be rendered incredibly powerful and ‘clean’ by nuclear standards. In one round of declassifi cations, the US Department of Defense admitted to developing an MRR, or a Minimal Residual Radiation weapon, which left almost no trace of the radiation that shows up on Geiger counters.

  Looking down on the Malacca Straits from the Piper, Mac saw the shadow of the plane on the green sea, and thought how a shadow was exactly what Mossad had become to BAIS. The Israelis and Indonesians both wanted to fi nd that second mini-nuke, but for very different reasons. The Indonesians just wanted the damned thing, after what happened at Kuta. And the Israelis? Mac chuckled darkly. The last thing they wanted was the world’s largest Muslim nation getting hold of a mini-nuke, especially one made in the Negev Desert.

  Mac pondered how far Ari would go to stop that happening.

  They fl ew north for half an hour and then the pilot, a Malay bloke in his twenties called Samson, pointed to a fl at shape sticking out into the water to their left.

  ‘Penang,’ he shouted over the noise of the two props.

  They turned westward and were soon hugging the south coast of Penang Island, the terracotta roofs of old George Town visible in the distance. After a few minutes they veered to the north in a steep bank as they lost altitude and seemed to be aiming for the palms. Mac tensed - Penang had an international airport, and this wasn’t it.

  Samson sensed his discomfort and smiled. ‘It okay - there is room!’

  They dropped like a stone as the revs came on and off, and then the wing fl aps came up. As they got down to the tree tops Mac realised there was a private airfi eld in the midst of a palm-oil plantation.

  The landing was surprisingly good and as they decelerated along the strip Mac was glad to have taken this option, courtesy of Benny Haskell. They turned and taxied back to a mid-size steel hangar, where a local man in red board shorts stood leaning against an old white Land Rover.

  The sea breeze made Mac’s overalls fl ap as he got out onto the sandy soil. Mac thanked Samson and walked up to John, the Land Rover guy. He was portly, about forty and impassive - possibly annoyed at Benny for pulling him away from something important? Either that or he was a spy.

  They drove for fi ve minutes down the narrow plantation tracks, palm oil trees swaying above, while Mac tried to keep his two bags steady between his ankles. Then they went over a small rise and Mac’s breath was momentarily taken away. They were in a spectacular bay on the west coast of Penang Island, a jetty sticking into the sky-blue water and fi shing boats moored against the jetty or run onto the beach. It was idyllic, but Mac had to remind himself that this area was the oldest continuously active piracy region on the planet.

  John walked Mac along the jetty, stopping halfway up. On Mac’s right was a closed-deck speedboat, painted black. At least forty feet long, it had a small open cockpit near the back and a long deck to the bow. Two large inboard props stuck menacingly from the stern and Mac could see no name or ID on the vessel. In the United States they were called sports cruisers, but in Italy and Greece they were known as cigarette boats because they were the favoured transport of smugglers. Mac put this black beauty in the second category. There were two large cargo hatches on the bow decking and he just knew there weren’t any beds or gin palaces below deck. This was a stripped-down, high-speed working boat.

  ‘Here is Mano,’ said John nervously, keen to get off the jetty.

  Mac fl icked him fi fty US and smiled. ‘Thanks, champ.’

  Mano put one Cat boot on the gunwale of the black beauty and leapt up onto the jetty. Mac’s height, Mano was built in the arms, chest and legs. He had a webbing holster at forty-fi ve degrees across his chest, which contained what Mac guessed was a Browning Hi-Power. The angle told him Mano was right-handed. In all cultures and without even speaking to him, Mano was instantly identifi able as a mercenary.

  ‘G’day,’ said Mac.

  Mano raised his chi
n slightly, appraising the situation through aviator shades. ‘Going to Idi?’

  Mac nodded and Mano offered his hand. After doing a palm shake, Mano leapt into the boat and stood with his arms open. Mac threw his pack and then the plastic shopping bag, warning, ‘This one’s heavy.’

  Mano caught it by bending at the knees and then put both bags under the rear seats. Mac noticed that he moved with complete effi ciency and certainty - reminiscent of Maori and Tongan soldiers Mac had known.

  Mac landed on the cockpit decks as the engines fi red in a deep, rough growl. There were pops and splutters and an incredible vibration through the fl oorboards as the engines roared to full song.

  Mano saw Mac’s reaction, and smiled. ‘V12s. Can take a while to warm up,’ he said, then bowed down, gripped his fi ngers under a handle fl ush with the decking and pulled up a trapdoor. ‘You travel with Mano, you travel with the best.’

  Looking down, Mac saw two large engines with alloy-coloured manifolds leading to six pipes on either side. Along the manifolds were the BMW rondels and a sign that said M-POWER.

  ‘Six litres, each one,’ smiled Mano. ‘Not fucking around here.’

  They cruised at around eighty knots as they headed due west for Idi on the east coast of northern Sumatra, a place Mac had hoped he’d never return to. He could have fl own in but Benny had warned him against it - Indonesian coast guard would see a private plane, put in a call and, next thing, Mac’s lack of immigration papers and the presence of the Glock handgun he’d borrowed from Benny might put him in the cells. On a good day, a simple bribe might work. On a bad day, there’d be beatings, maybe the German shepherds would have some fun.

  The speed of the craft was giving Mac’s body a battering and he wondered what he’d feel like if Mano hadn’t insisted that he put on the kidney belt. The Malacca Strait was not only one of the world’s busiest waterways for container shipping, it was also the main source for the fi sh markets from Medan, Penang and KL to Singapore, Riau and Kelang. There were fi shing vessels everywhere, some of them too small to be out so far in the channel. The container ships sounded their foghorns for minutes at a time as they steamed through clusters of boats carrying on with impunity. In the Malacca, locals ruled and they weren’t going home for some dickhead in white shorts and a funny cap. Through all of this Mano kept the speed up, occasionally slowing down for a bunch of boats.