Golden Serpent am-1

by Mark Abernethy

  Jenny shook her head, moved back to her crew.

  CHAPTER 43

  Mac lay in the bath, let it soak, the sound of CNN echoing through the apartment. It was all Golden Serpent, with an ever-increasing roster of experts being dragged in from think tanks, universities, government and police to give their opinions. Mac felt wearied by most of the comments. The experts didn’t seem to know what they were doing on air any more than the anchor did.

  It was fi ve-thirty pm in Singapore and the authorities still hadn’t declared the emergency over. The city was evacuated, Changi was closed and the port was locked up.

  Coiffed reporters did live crosses from as far north as Tokyo and as far south as Sydney. Without a press centre to spoonfeed them, it was mostly only conjecture making it onto the tops and bottoms of the hour.

  CNN was trying to link the Jakarta shoot-out with Golden Serpent. A good leap, but no one was confi rming it. And POLRI hadn’t confi rmed anything except the presence of two deceased males in a north Jakarta warehouse.

  The whole thing was still in play, even though Mac knew almost for certain that the Twentieth would have had enough time to do what they did better than anyone else.

  All the media had were two offi cers and two ‘engineers’ being escorted off the ship. They were still seeking confi rmation regarding the number of deceased still on board. The media would have to wait for the detectives, and the detectives had to wait for the CBNRE guys to give the all-clear. In the meantime, they had scores of shots of bio-hazard suits swarming over Golden Serpent ‘s container stacks.

  Mac wondered about Edi’s inciting incident theory. Indonesian intel types tended to see Chinese motivations that Westerners might miss. But then again, some of the inciting incidents staged by intelligence organisations over the years were hardly in the realms of common sense. If nothing else, Edi’s outlook made a good fi t with what Wylie had told him on Golden Serpent, about Garrison referring to the VX bomb as an incident tailored to CNN.

  Back in Sulawesi, Cookie B had gone immediately to the money.

  As in: where’s Garrison’s payday? Now another Indonesian spook had bypassed Mac’s entire carefully assembled scenario to state the obvious: that someone stood to gain from making Singapore look insecure and easily attacked, and from a maritime source.

  Mac ducked under the water, the taste of shit and bleach still in his mouth, gunfi re still ringing in his ears.

  The knee didn’t feel too painful as he dried off. If it was going to be a problem, it would fl are up by morning.

  Pulling the curtains, he turned off his mobile phone and crawled between clean sheets.

  He mused briefl y about how strange it was to lie in Jenny’s bed thinking about Diane. Then fi nally, mercifully, sleep came.

  Bacon, coffee and eggs fi lled Mac’s nostrils. He opened his eyes, not knowing where he was for a few seconds. The bedside clock said 7.20 am but he felt like he could sleep for another twenty-four hours.

  ‘Hey, sleeping beauty,’ said Jenny when Mac appeared in his undies. He went for a cheek kiss but she took it on the lips. Tasted of Close-Up, the red one.

  Jenny was about to leave for work and there was a cooked breakfast for Mac ready on the table.

  ‘You know,’ she said, pulling back. ‘I liked coming home to a man in my bed, even if he was dead to the world.’

  They stared at each other for what felt like an eternity. Then Mac said, ‘Umm, I liked it too.’

  They both drew breaths. Six years of sex and so much not said.

  She play-slapped him, laughing. ‘You!’

  ‘Me?!’ he said, laughing too.

  ‘Yes, you!’

  ‘I never done nothing.’

  She gave him a look, like That’s the point, stupid.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  Mac nodded. ‘Still in one piece, can’t complain.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Jen.

  Mac didn’t know if he was ready to talk about the children. ‘You know, what happened down there…’ He shook his head, the words not coming.

  ‘There could be a happy ending for this lot,’ said Jenny. ‘We think they’re from northern Cambodia and southern Laos, so there’s a chance of getting them back to their families.’

  Jenny was probably putting a gloss on it to make him feel better, thought Mac, but he didn’t care. He wanted to believe there was a happy ending for those kids.

  ‘I’ll tell John. He’ll want to know that,’ said Mac.

  Jenny’s eyes softened. She fi shed in her holster bag, came out with her spare keys. Put them in his hand, seeming a little embarrassed. ‘I, umm…’

  Jenny Toohey was not a woman who gave her house keys to a man.

  She started to say something, then rubbed at her eye, looked away.

  ‘Bloody pollen,’ said Mac.

  ‘It’s a shocker,’ agreed Jenny, then paused. ‘All that drama yesterday.

  I forgot to tell you… I wanted to say to you, ‘cos if you ever, you know…’

  Mac couldn’t tell her to forget it. Couldn’t bat this one away.

  ‘Umm, when I saw that bloke Paul and that bullet wound. And I realised what had happened down there, I…’

  Mac put his right hand out. Took her left. She looked at the ceiling, took big gulps.

  ‘The life we choose, right?’ said Mac.

  ‘Or did it choose us?’ she said lightly, like it was meant to be a joke. But her heart wasn’t in it. Truth was, the protocol for people who ran the danger of being killed in their line of work was to gloss over the obvious. You made endless jokes about farts, penises, cross-dressing, gay sex, masturbation, constipation and incontinence – all of it to bring people closer without having to say, By the way, in case you’re shot tomorrow…

  Mac didn’t know what to do, so he hugged her, feeling her wet nose and eyes against his neck. She burrowed in, sniffl ed. Held tight.

  Then she moved her mouth up to his ear.

  Wasn’t till she was out the door that he realised she’d said I love you.

  The bacon and eggs were Nirvana, the toast bliss, the freshly brewed coffee outstanding. Mac wolfed the lot and chased it with an orange.

  He turned on the television and saw the Singapore story still unfolding, but he muted it – still a bit lost in the moment with Jenny. Then he rinsed plates and put them in the dishwasher, wiped down the breakfast table and the benches and cleaned the sink with some Ajax.

  Jenny was a great cop but a lousy housekeeper.

  He took a long shower, pulled his ovies out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer. If he got on a fl ight that day, he might buy some threads. But if he was kosher with the embassy, he would see what he had lying around in his locker in the compound.

  For the fi rst time in weeks he had a sense of time and ease and it felt good to have some tucker in his belly, some sleep under his belt.

  He hit the sound on the TV and saw the cable news services still hadn’t fi nalised the Golden Serpent story. One of the terminals at Singapore had reopened for a few exceptional shipments, but Keppel and Brani were still locked down and the city was evacuated with martial law in force. Sixty or seventy ships were standing off in the Singapore Strait.

  Changi was only dealing in government and military aircraft.

  Something was holding up the declaration that the emergency was over. The Singapore government would be climbing the walls with frustration, thought Mac.

  Then it came. Fox News had found a Singaporean politician who was lambasting the government’s lack of preparedness for a maritime terror incident. And the clincher… Singapore needs closer military ties with its friends. And he wasn’t talking about the Americans. The biggest trump that the pro-China lobby held in Singapore was the fact that the

  US

  Navy had a policy of not informing host countries of arrival times for their ships. It made it easy for the pro-China lobby to typify the Americans as arrogant and interested in t
heir own geopolitical game rather than the wellbeing of Singapore’s economy.

  Another Singaporean man came on, from a commerce asso ciation, talking about a realistic defence policy.

  To Mac’s ear it sounded rigged. The words ‘friends’ and ‘realistic’

  – when they were used in the Singapore context – were terms straight from the MSS propaganda manual. The Chinese had spent thirty years infi ltrating all layers of Singapore’s political, bureaucratic, military and commercial elites. Which was why the Americans found it impossible to get Singapore to become a full client-state.

  Edi had been right, thought Mac. Golden Serpent was starting to look like an inciting incident.

  Catching sight of Jen’s phone charger, Mac grabbed his Nokia from the bedroom, brought it through and plugged it in. Booting up, the envelope graphic appeared. He sat on the sofa, hit ‘messages’.

  The fi rst one was a text: Call me urgent. Paul. It had been sent at 10.30 the previous evening.

  The next message was an invitation to call his service provider’s voicemail service. Mac dialled in. It was from Don, the DIA guy, wanting to talk quick-smart about ‘our friends’. He left a number, said the secret handshake was ‘fi refl y’.

  Mac started with Don. The number was a global-connect free call that took him to what sounded like the Pentagon.

  ‘It’s Richard Davis here, Southern Scholastic Books. Could I speak with Don in Defense Intelligence Agency, please?’

  ‘What’s the time there, Mr Davis?’ said the woman.

  ‘Firefl y.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Connecting you now.’

  The connection buzzed and clicked.

  ‘Don? It’s Mac.’

  ‘Shit! Thanks for getting back to me, McQueen.’

  He sounded like crap, like a man who hadn’t slept.

  ‘How can I help you?’ asked Mac.

  ‘We clear?’ asked Don, meaning were they on a secure line.

  ‘Personal cell phone,’ said Mac.

  Don hesitated.

  ‘I bought it three days ago from a convenience store. It’s clear,’ said Mac.

  ‘Listen. Okay. So…’ started Don, clearly jangled.

  ‘Everything okay?’ asked Mac. ‘CNN’s not saying it’s over. It is over, right?’

  ‘Umm, our friends.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘They got into the container.’

  Mac assumed they had, to wire their IED. ‘Yep?’

  ‘And we’ve disabled the device.’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘And we’ve secured the agent.’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘Umm – you sure this is clear?’

  ‘It’s clear.’

  Don cleared his throat. ‘McQueen, we shipped one hundred and eighty bombs.’

  ‘Yep?’

  ‘There’s only a hundred and seventy-nine bombs in that container.’

  There was a big pause.

  ‘Shit. You know where it is?’ asked Mac.

  There was a sudden commotion, Hatfi eld bellowing in the background. Mac could envisage the Chinook’s situation room: incoming calls from the Oval Offi ce, the Singapore President and the Pentagon. Soldiers, spooks and scientists wincing at having the paint stripped off them.

  Mac thought fast. ‘Have you searched the seabed? They may have tossed it, trying to extend this as long as possible.’

  ‘We’re got divers down there. But once you start on that, you have to retrace its route. We’ve got the SONAR birds doing that as well. It’s not there. We’re assuming our friends are travelling with it.’

  Mac exhaled. ‘What about the ship? It’s a big tub, lots of areas to conceal something like that.’

  ‘All over it with explosive detectors. Been going all night with revolving shifts. We’ve got our Europe team here too. Nothing. It’s with them.’

  Mac thought about the ro-ro ship, the one he and Paul assumed had been hijacked by Sabaya.

  ‘Look, here’s a left-fi eld one, okay?’ said Mac. ‘On our way into Singers yesterday we came through Brani Island and there was this large unmarked ro-ro ship on the south side of the island.’

  ‘We searched that area, I think,’ said Don.

  ‘I don’t think they dropped the VX bomb there. But my hunch is they stole the ship. They were last seen motoring for Brani Island on a tender boat fi rst thing in the morning. The Golden Serpent offi cers told us that,’ said Mac.

  ‘Could have been getting a helo from Brani or Sentosa,’ said Don.

  ‘In that case you’ll have to check fl ight logs. They were going to controlled airspace that morning because of Xiong coming in so air traffi c control would have been noticing everything.’

  ‘You said the ro-ro ship was unmarked?’

  ‘Yeah. No name, no shipping line, couldn’t see any fl ags. If it’s unmarked then there’s something fi shy about it. Like your transporter for the VX, right?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The thing to do is get the Singaporeans to tell us exactly what the ship is for, who owns it and why it was docked there. We have to get access to that warehouse, too.’

  ‘Warehouse?’ asked Don.

  ‘Yeah, the tailgate of the ship was down and I heard sounds in this security building. It’s built like a bunker. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘If we can identify the ship then we have something to chase.

  And if we know what’s in that warehouse, we have some kind of clue about where they’re headed.’

  ‘Think I can swing that,’ said Don.

  ‘The thing to remember,’ said Mac, ‘is that these guys had the chance to do what Garrison did and just fl y away to another country.

  But if I’m right, they’ve taken the most conspicuous escape they could have taken.’

  ‘See what you mean.’

  Mac felt he’d done his bit, helped out a fellow professional. But Don wasn’t fi nished with him.

  ‘Look, I thought we could use a Sabaya expert. Most of your calls have been correct so far,’ said Don, almost sheepish. A big change of attitude.

  ‘What, you want me by the phone for the next couple of days?’

  ‘Umm, no. I was hoping we could get you on the bird with Sawtell’s unit?’

  Mac hissed air, neither body nor mind up for this. ‘I would, but I’ve got things to sort out with the embassy, and -‘

  ‘All done,’ said Don.

  ‘All done?’

  ‘Yeah – sorry, McQueen. I took the liberty. Forgive me, willya? I’ll buy you a beer sometime.’

  Don was in a tough place, to be throwing a beer into the deal.

  ‘You took the liberty?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Umm, yeah. You’re seconded. Call it a specialist rotation.’

  Mac laughed. ‘Where?’

  ‘Halim. Noon. Firefl y.’

  CHAPTER 44

  It was 8.36 am. Mac had a few hours up his sleeve before he had to make for Halim on the outskirts of Jakarta. He dialled the number Paul had left and waited. It went to voicemail. He rang off and checked on the ovies to see if they were dry.

  Mac’s Nokia rang as he was looking for a wayward sock in the dryer.

  Jogging into the kitchen, he leaned over and grabbed the phone.

  ‘Davis.’

  ‘Hi sweetheart, get the fl owers?’ It was Paul.

  ‘Oh those were fl owers? Sorry, just wiped my arse with them,’ said Mac, thinking Paul was sounding alert for a guy with a gunshot wound.

  ‘Mate, thought you might like to come down and have a chat with a new addition to the team?’ said Paul.

  ‘Voluntary new addition?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Haven’t decided yet, mate. Come down, have a natter.’

  The address was four blocks from Jenny’s. Paul had a subject in what they called a ‘cabin’. It was like a safehouse, except in a cabin you generally interrogated people. There was nothing safe about it.

  Mac stretched ou
t as he walked. He had his ovies and Hi-Tecs on but no Heckler.

  The address was a duplex on a quiet, tree-lined sidestreet away from the main boulevards. Mac knocked, saw an eye fl ash over the peep hole. Someone had been standing or sitting right there.

  The door opened. A burly bloke with a holster pouch around his middle stepped out and gestured for a pat-down. Mac submitted.

  Bloke checked in and behind his ears too then ushered him through.

  ‘They’re in the living room, sir.’

  Mac clocked Paul and two other men: trop shirts, hip rigs. Clean-cut, athletically built. Sitting on coffee tables and chairs, they were gathered around something of interest. Not a TV, but a blonde woman wearing jeans and a pale blue polo shirt. Very good-looking, curvy.

  Big black eye. Bruised neck.

  All eyes turned to Mac, his eyes on Diane.

  She smiled up at him, embarrassed, then looked away. It was obvious she hadn’t had much sleep last night. He wondered if the lads had been taking turns winding her up, getting her to slip in her story.

  Paul stood, hooked Mac by the arm. ‘Time for a cuppa, yeah?’

  ‘What’s the story?’ asked Mac after Paul closed the kitchen door.

  Paul’s nose strap was new, the black eye was subsiding and he was moving freely despite the rib wound.

  ‘Her name’s Diane,’ said Paul. ‘Been working for us on the Garrison thing. Allegedly.’

  ‘What’s she doing here?’

  Paul gave him the look. The don’t shit me look. ‘This is the bird you were asking me about, right?’

  Mac shrugged.

  ‘You asked me if our side had someone infi ltrated to Garrison, remember? I said I didn’t know,’ said Paul.

  ‘Yeah, got ya,’ said Mac.

  ‘That’s her, mate,’ said Paul, jigging his thumb over his shoulder.

  Paul and Mac looked at one another. At every meeting of even friendly intel types, there was a point where you had to decide if you were going to divulge, or bullshit.

  Mac’s brain spun. He decided to half-divulge, see what it would fl ush out. ‘You know, I thought she was a double,’ he said.

  ‘For who?’ asked Paul.