Alan McQueen - 02 - Second Strike

by Mark Abernethy

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘And you ran it, found the owner?’ Sweat mingled with Mac’s head wound, stinging beneath the dressing the soldiers had given him.

  ‘Yep.’ Freddi reached for the water.

  ‘Who was he?’ asked Mac.

  Freddi returned the water, moved his left toe in a fi gure of eight in the sand. Embarrassed.

  ‘What’s up, mate?’

  Freddi changed his stance, shook his head and looked everywhere but Mac. ‘Can’t talk about that, McQueen.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You know why,’ he said.

  ‘Your guys in on this, Freddi?’ Mac pushed, and the next thing he knew there was a hand around his throat, perfectly poised on his carotid pressure points. Then the hand wasn’t there and Mac’s own hands were in the surrender pose and Freddi was looking at the sky, chest heaving with adrenaline and stress.

  ‘I’m sorry, mate,’ said Mac, rubbing at his throat. He hadn’t wanted to smear BAIS but he was tired and confused.

  ‘No, McQueen - I’m sorry,’ said Freddi, trying to deepen and lengthen his breaths as he stood in front of Mac. ‘I am so sorry.’

  Mac took a gamble. ‘Purni?’

  Freddi sagged, his shoulders dropping and his hands turning up, as if asking why? ‘You were right, McQueen and I am very ashamed.’

  ‘Mate, don’t be -‘

  ‘No, I am ashamed,’ he insisted. ‘After that ambush here in ‘02, I could only see the Jew and the Australian - that’s what went in my report, McQueen, but I knew. I knew and I ignored it to show hate for foreigners. I took the easy way, the wrong way.’

  ‘Look, it happens, Fred -‘

  ‘No, McQueen, because you knew about Purni. You warned me, remember?’

  Mac nodded, looked away.

  ‘And later, back in Jakarta, I realise it must be Purni. Who has military radio? Who can tell Hassan and Gorilla where we are and what we doing? After we do latents, we ran the number and pick up Purnoto. Purni want to talk, he so scared - he ashamed of that girl being shot and the boy. You know. He want it to be over.’

  ‘What did you get out of him?’

  ‘Ha!’ snorted Freddi, shaking his head with a bitter smile.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We get Purni down in the basement and he talking, right?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘And we were just talking, talking, trying to fi nd where second device, right?’ said Freddi, getting worked up again.

  ‘And you did - this is it.’

  Freddi nodded. ‘He told us it was stored at this air base, in the underground magazine. But we only talking to him twenty minutes, and he scared, McQueen - I mean real scared. All of us guys was thinking this could be a session where we solve many secret, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah, and?’

  ‘And down come deputy director of operation, not even eight o’clock in morning,’ said Freddi, disgusted.

  ‘Shit, Freddi - you worked through that entire night?’

  Freddi nodded.

  ‘And down comes the brass?’

  ‘Yeah, and take him,’ said Freddi.

  ‘What, away?’ Mac couldn’t believe it.

  Freddi nodded. ‘This is problem for Indonesi. It not American fault, it not fault of Jew or Australian or Chinese.’

  ‘Why was Hassan calling him?’

  ‘Purni say they want inside help, protection from BAIS, because you and me in same hotel - they smell the rat.’

  ‘Oh shit, Freddi!’

  ‘What I said. Purni say he want to be left alone, he in love with a girl now. But these are scary people, and Purni want to tell me.’

  They were silent while they thought it through. Mac, frowning, was fi rst to raise the obvious. ‘So where are we now?’

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, McQueen,’ said Freddi, angry again.

  ‘There are bad people in your intelligence and army too.’

  Mac nodded agreement. Freddi was right. There were ASIS people in Jakarta right now trying to work out how to stop him taking the Hassan matter any further. He half expected his own director of operations to appear at any moment. But he had to push things forward. ‘So, Freddi, I can work with you?’

  Freddi looked away. ‘There are people in this country who want bombings, to bring more money from America and Australia and Saudi Arabia and Egypt,’ he said, fuming. ‘It make them rich. But that is not for me, or any of those guy you see in basement yesterday morning. Do we look rich?!’

  Shaking his head, Mac remembered that the former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid had told journalists that he feared the Bali bombings had been paid for by elements of the Indonesian police and military who wanted to keep the money fl owing from the Americans for the War on Terror.

  He sighed. ‘Look, sorry mate, okay? I’m trying to work this out myself and after the shootings at the Lar …’ he trailed off.

  Freddi nodded but he was clearly struggling to stay calm. ‘Now we have the new problem.’

  ‘Second device?’

  ‘Yep,’ said Freddi. ‘It had nothing to do with Purni - he was surprised to get call fi ve year later.’

  ‘So it’s … what?’

  ‘So it Hassan and nuke device,’ said Freddi, numbering the points off his left hand. ‘And it for other client.’

  ‘Client?’ asked Mac.

  Shrugging, Freddi nodded. ‘This Hassan is not jihadi or com-munist, right? He all business.’

  Mac got that. ‘And so we’ve lucked out here, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Freddi grimly. ‘And no more Purni to ask.’

  They turned to go back to the Kopassus troops and the Hueys, where Mac wanted to check on Mano and get him back to Penang.

  But Freddi stopped him.

  ‘Um, McQueen? When I found you with that girl over there, remember?’

  Mac nodded.

  ‘You were empty, like body is here but man is not.’

  Mac looked at the sand.

  ‘Well, mite, that girl and her brother are Indonesian and I was responsible for them,’ said Freddi, his chest heaving. ‘And that girl got her arm shot away and a boy was taken, I think about this every day of my life and sometimes when I see my own kids being happy, I feel like crying.’

  Mac nodded, head down, not wanting to look at the bloke.

  ‘So please do not be the judge of me, okay?’

  A monkey screeched and Mac mouthed sorry as Freddi walked away.

  CHAPTER 47

  Mano was sitting up, pale and slack in the face but drinking water, when Mac got back to the Hueys.

  ‘That was a long piss,’ Mano quipped as Mac got to the side of the helo.

  ‘You’re feeling better, I see,’ said Mac. He liked Mano even if he didn’t like what he did for a living.

  ‘Checking out the old avgas bunkers, yeah?’ said Mano.

  ‘Yeah,’ smiled Mac, making to get onboard the helo. ‘Just seeing what’s left in the magazine.’

  Freddi was getting Malaysian permission to fl y Mano into Penang and if that wasn’t allowed then Freddi was going to drop him at Gleneagles Hospital in Medan.

  Mano looked at Mac strangely. ‘That’s not the magazine,’ he said, pointing towards where Mac had just been with Freddi. ‘Magazine’s up this way.’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the bush north of the airfi eld, where Merpati had been shot.

  Confused, Mac looked out of the helo he’d just clambered into.

  ‘We were just down there, mate. It’s an underground bunker, right?’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s one north too. It’s deeper and has a secret entrance,’ said Mano.

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘Well, would you store the gasoline with the munitions, if this was your base?’

  ‘No. No I wouldn’t,’ said Mac, trying to stay clear through his fatigue. ‘You’re saying that there’s two underground storage areas?’

  Mano nodded. ‘Japs were thorough.’

  ‘
And the one just over here is for fuel, but the one north of the fi eld is the magazine?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. About a hundred metres north of these buildings, on the ocean side,’ said Mano.

  Mac slid off the helo deck, muttering darkly. There was nothing better than local knowledge, except a smuggler’s local knowledge.

  ‘It’s well hidden, low to the ground,’ added Mano, ‘and it had a big military warning on it - a TNI seal.’

  ‘I bet it did,’ growled Mac as he walked away.

  The magazine entrance was almost hidden in the undergrowth, but when they found it, Mac and Freddi both realised why Santo was kidnapped and Merpati putatively executed. The entrance to the magazine was just fi fty metres away from where Mac had stashed the kids under that fallen tree. Looking at the landscape, Mac wondered if after the Hassan thugs had secured the device and made their escape, they’d seen Merpati and one of them had shot her, maybe by mistake.

  Then, when Santo had made a run for it, they would have seen he was just a kid and snatched him rather than make a scene with more gunfi re.

  Someone had decided Merpati was dead. Which she almost was.

  Freddi stood in front of the ramp that went down into the magazine. The big iron swing doors were open and the red and white skull and crossbones TNI seal - a diagonal crossing of locking bars that declared this the property of the Indonesian generals - was discarded in the thick undergrowth. Freddi muttered an order at four of the soldiers and they walked down slowly, looking for booby traps. The soldiers found two plastique charges and then Freddi turned on his Maglite and led them down the ramp into the gloom.

  A series of chambers branched off the main underground avenue, one of which had a new fi re door that had been left open. Freddi and the soldiers shone their torches into the chamber, illuminating four chains hanging from the ceiling with a table suspended on the end of them. It had been designed to keep something dry and Mac guessed it had survived the Boxing Day tsunami that had devastated the region in ‘04, judging by the lack of water damage in the chamber.

  ‘That it, guys. Nothing,’ muttered Freddi, walking out.

  Mac and Freddi found a trail around the entrance - about six men, in boots, fi ve to seven hours old, depending on what the morning dew had been like. They walked the footpad and it terminated at the north end of the dirt runway in a swirl of boot tracks and aircraft tyres. Mac and Freddi agreed on a scenario: the plane had taxied to the north head of the runway, turned to face the south, maybe not even bothering to depower. The Hassan crew had retrieved the device from its hide, boobied the magazine, walked back to the plane and fl own away.

  Crouching, Mac had a closer look. The boots were mostly Hi-Tecs and one US Army desert issue. The aircraft had tricycle landing gear, single tyre at the nose and double tyres at the two underwing points, suggesting a plane the size of a King Air 200 - a twin-engine, twelve-seater.

  ‘King Air 200,’ mumbled Mac. ‘Get fi fteen-hundred miles out of the right one, with the right tank set-up.’

  ‘Could go north to Thailand, east to Singapore, west to Sri Lanka,’

  mused Freddi. And then, shrugging facetiously, ‘Could maybe get to Darwin.’

  Mac’s pulse banged so hard in his head that it felt like his wound was going to split open. Then everything became clear.

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Mac, breaking into a run. ‘ Fuck! ‘

  He hit full pace as he scythed through the bush, through the palms and the undergrowth and the dry creek beds that he’d walked through years ago. He retraced them now, but at a headlong sprint.

  He leapt over trees, elbowed low-hanging branches and muttered to himself - a sure sign that he was in danger of doing something from his emotions rather than his brain.

  Behind him he could hear Freddi shouting McQueen, McQueen, but he kept sprinting, fi nally bursting out onto the beach and stopping, his legs like jelly, his mouth dry and rasping for breath. He jogged for the jetty, his lungs wheezing as he struggled for oxygen. Behind him, Freddi burst out onto the beach too.

  ‘McQueen,’ he shouted weakly. ‘Where are we going?’

  Mac didn’t turn, just waved at Freddi to follow him, before racing down the jetty, his back a wall of wet fabric. The dressing was peeling from his forehead wound with all the exertion and he whipped it off, chucking it into the water. As he got to the black beauty, three kites squawked into the air. He stopped, heart thumping, resting against a post as he looked down at the pirates’ bodies lying together by the transom. Along the rest of the cockpit decking there was a lot of smeared blood and seven pieces of paper, drying in the sun. The bandage tins and mosquito sprays and tins of Savlon had held the rescued papers in place.

  Freddi got alongside him and doubled over, hands on his knees.

  ‘Too old for this, McQueen,’ he gasped.

  ‘I hope I’m wrong, Freddi,’ Mac panted, leaping on to the deck of the speedboat and reaching down to pick up the last piece of paper he’d rescued out there in the Malacca. It was now dry and the effect of the water had made the blue ballpoint ink run away from the original lines, leaving those lines thinner and more accurate, perhaps closer to what the writer wanted to express.

  ‘See this?’ he asked, as Freddi lowered himself into the boat.

  ‘I found this in that other airfi eld, behind Medan, up behind Binjai.’

  Freddi took it, looked at the one thing written on it. ‘Thanks for telling us, McQueen.’

  ‘You got everything else, mate, remember? Didn’t think this was important,’ Mac shrugged, telling a small lie. ‘I found it in a burned-down building.’

  ‘Burned? Don’t think we saw a burned building.’

  ‘No, it had been done after the Kopassus chased them off. I just went up later to have a nosey-poke and I found this charred building, still smoking.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, so whatever they were burning was worth the risk of doubling back while there was Kopassus and BAIS in the area. You with me?’

  ‘Wish you’d told me earlier.’

  ‘Thing is, Fred, I kept this because someone had written on it, right? See how the bottom is burned away so that we don’t get the full context of N W because whatever’s below it is gone.’

  Freddi nodded. ‘No context.’

  ‘I spent years wondering about that N W. I asked all our desks, all the analysts, I asked the Indians, Americans, Japs, I asked army guys and diplomats. The only thing I could come up with was the North-West, as in the North-West Frontier of Pakistan.’

  ‘Pretty broad,’ said Freddi.

  ‘But, mate, what if it’s got nothing to do with the context?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Freddi.

  ‘Freddi, in our game we talk about context until we make it religion, but sometimes things are simple.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘So what if it’s just the wrong way up?’

  Freddi and Mac looked down at the piece of paper as Fred slowly turned it around.

  ‘Okay, Fred, now what does it say?’ said Mac.

  The washed-out blue ballpoint writing now said M IV.

  Freddi chewed his bottom lip and looked into Mac’s eyes. ‘Well, it say “M 4”, McQueen, but I guess that not the American assault rifl e?’

  ‘Let’s get back to context, Freddi,’ said Mac. ‘You’ve got Abu Samir and Hassan Ali, risking their necks to double back and destroy a bunch of documents.’

  Freddi’s eyes widened. ‘It say M4 - Mantiqi Four,’ he said very slowly, looking back from the paper to Mac, hardly believing what he was seeing.

  ‘The part that’s been burned away - I bet - said Operasi or Operation,’

  said Mac. ‘I think this was a cover sheet for a plan of their next attack.’

  ‘But Mantiqi Four is -‘

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Mac, looking back towards the beach. ‘Their Fourth Brigade. The second device is on its way to Australia.’

  CHAPTER 48

  The meeting with Atkin
s did not go well. They arm-wrestled about a mini-nuke bound for Australia, a concept Atkins completely dismissed.

  When Mac showed Atkins the paper with M IV written on it, the Jakarta operations chief for ASIS actually scoffed.

  ‘That could be anything, McQueen - I mean, shit,’ he muttered, almost throwing it back.

  Mac wasn’t ready to back down and demanded that the embassy’s military attache sit in. Atkins refused and did what all good offi ce guys do: pulled in the troops. Jill Watson, an analyst on the Indonesia Desk who specialised in JI, crept into Atkins’ offi ce, sheepish at the raised voices that had been echoing out.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ asked Atkins, pointing at Mac’s piece of paper.

  She looked at the paper and then looked at Atkins, waiting for her cue. Atkins sneered, asked, ‘I mean, does that tell us that whoever wrote it is about to nuke Australia?’

  It was an unfair question but it told Watson what her role was.

  ‘No,’ she said, with the confi dence of the true weakling. ‘It could mean Mantiqi Four, is that what you’re saying, Alan?’

  Mac looked down at her, saw the plain face, the boxy ankles and the look of one-dimensional intellect in her eye and realised it wasn’t her fault that she was like this. If every promotion you ever saw in DFAT was predicated on toadying abilities, then that became the currency.

  ‘You’re willing to make that call, not knowing anything except what he wants to hear?’ asked Mac, pointing at Atkins.

  ‘No, not at all,’ she said, fl ustered, looking at Atkins for support.

  Atkins looked away - a true offi ce guy, abandoning a person who couldn’t hurt him. ‘It’s just that, um -‘

  ‘Yes?’ asked Mac,

  ‘Well, Mantiqi Four is also Papua,’ said Watson.

  ‘Oh Papua? You mean that famous target of jihadi rhetoric, that mythical land of Anglo pornographers and alcoholics?’ said Mac.

  ‘Okay,’ she blushed, realising her Alpha Dog had cut her loose and was now leaning back in his chair, pretending to look at his email. ‘It says M4, but so what?’

  ‘You’re the analyst, Jill. Why aren’t you asking me about the context?’

  ‘Well -‘

  ‘Because I’ll tell you something, mate, I’ve been with this fi rm for seventeen years and this is the fi rst time I’ve ever stood in this section and claimed that someone might be trying to nuke Australia, okay?