Double back am-3

by Mark Abernethy

  Kaui ran point, slowing every so often to get a sighting of the mercenaries’ helo through the high canopy. After ten minutes, Mac saw the Papuans waiting ahead and walked the last fifty metres to them, his legs rubbery, lungs empty.

  ‘Water, fellers,’ he gasped as he put a hand on a tree for support. ‘Need a drink.’

  The OPM boys chuckled and Kaui pointed down to a steeply inclined water race. It consisted of a half-pipe that was at least three metres across, set in concrete braces. Water half-filled the race and it was moving at speed. Climbing one of the concrete braces of the structure, Mac dipped his cupped hand into the manmade rapid and drank greedily. Looking up, he saw that although the forest had been cleared to build the water race, that had been probably ten years ago, and the canopy had almost joined over the half-pipe again.

  His thirst sated, Mac turned to find Kaui and the other OPM operators beside him on the large concrete brace, still carrying the Patrol’s back seats.

  ‘What are they for?’ asked Mac, as Albert laid the foam and fabric back seat on the surface of the rapids, making water rise up and over it.

  ‘Get on,’ said Kaui, smiling broadly.

  ‘Get on what?’ demanded Mac.

  ‘Your raft,’ winked Kaui.

  Mac stared at him. He’d first met Kaui at UQ, when Mac was a solid centre for the university rugby club and Kaui was a flashy winger. They’d shared a sense of humour and an understanding of bending the rules as far as they had to be bent in order to win. He liked the man and trusted him, but Kaui also liked to make Anglos uncomfortable when they came into his world.

  ‘This is a wind-up, right?’ laughed Mac. ‘I’m not getting on that thing!’

  Kaui deadpanned him and the sound of the mercs’ helo thromped above the screech of birds and the rush of the water race.

  ‘Fuck, mate,’ spat Mac, not wanting to lose face. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Slurry flume – it’s how they get the copper ore from Lok Kok to the loading terminal at the coast.’

  ‘Slurry?’ asked Mac, sceptical.

  ‘Yeah, but when the mine’s shut down for maintenance, they just run overflow from the reservoir down it,’ said Kaui.

  ‘Where does it go? How far does it drop like this?’ said Mac.

  Shrugging, Kaui said, ‘Well, it drops like this to the coastal plain, then it goes through pumping stations to the port at Amamapare.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Kaui,’ said Mac, certain that the other Papuans were finding this highly amusing.

  ‘We need to get off the road,’ Kaui pointed out. ‘Less you want to run through the jungle all day?’

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ grumbled Mac as he leaned forward onto the Patrol’s foam seat, water immediately rushing up the back of his shirt and through the Steyr. Mac had performed HALO jumps from planes and nocturnal combat-diving missions. But just standing at the top of the big slide at Wet ’n’ Wild on the Gold Coast gave him sweaty palms.

  ‘See you down there, Mac,’ shouted Kaui, suddenly pushing the foam seat into the rapid. Before Mac could protest, Albert was landing on his back. The makeshift raft took off like a bullet out of a gun and as they accelerated Mac wondered how his youthful visions of being a gentleman spy had turned into tobogganing down a mine slurry pipe in West Papua, being held down by a large local called Albert.

  Sensing Mac’s fear, Albert whispered into his ear that it was all going to be okay, that it was a cakewalk the whole way down. Then they crested a ridge and the half-pipe turned into a full pipe as it went almost vertical.

  Mac’s screams echoed for thousands of metres as they free-fell into the darkness.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mac lay on the floor of the Hino minibus with Kaui as Albert drove through the outskirts of Amamapare, the port on the south coast of West Papua which serviced the major mines in the highlands. The South African mercs would be looking for payback regardless of whether the Korean mining company was still paying them. They’d be staking out the airports in the southern part of West Papua, and if they had connections in Jakarta, the Indonesian military might help them look for Mac and Kaui.

  They found a small copying and business centre and Albert went in, opened Mac’s mail box and returned with his emergency pack of passports, credit cards and a change of clothes. Driving in silence through Amamapare, the eventual grinding sounds of conveyor belts and ore spreaders indicated they were probably in Portsite, where ships were loaded with what was dug out of the Lok Kok mine.

  ‘Sounds like your stop, Mac,’ said Kaui in the darkness.

  Still recovering from his terror-ride down the slurry pipe, Mac wanted to be grateful to Kaui but he’d lost his sense of humour. People often misunderstood his special forces background: to succeed in that world was not about reckless risks, it was all about calculated, controlled execution. And free-falling into a slurry pipe was not his idea of control.

  The minibus stopped and Mac lifted the tarpaulin he’d been lying under. Through the window he could see the giant gantry and spreader spewing an ore concentrate into a bulker, the whole vision lit up by floodlights which stretched down the wharf and along the decks of the ship.

  ‘Stay cool, brother,’ said Kaui as Mac made to go.

  Despite his irritation, Mac reluctantly accepted a hug from his old rugby team-mate.

  ‘One hell of a performance in that pipe,’ smiled Kaui. ‘Was that a scream or a yodel?’

  ‘You’ll get a slap one of these days, mate,’ said Mac, shaking his head. ‘Swear to God.’

  After thanking Albert, Mac padded down the steps of the Hino onto the weed-infested wharf apron. Then he walked under the conveyorbelt loader towards the rear of the Java Princess in his fresh chinos and shirt. The first officer, a Singaporean Chinese, was expecting him and showed him to a small stateroom.

  ‘We sail at o-one hundred,’ said the officer. ‘You eaten?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ said Mac.

  ‘Need someone to look at that?’ said the officer, gesturing towards Mac’s facial burn.

  ‘Nah, I’m sweet,’ Mac replied. ‘But a cold beer might help.’

  Smiling and pointing to the fridge, the officer left the room.

  Kicking off his shoes, Mac grabbed a can of Tiger, turned down the lights and fiddled with the TV remote as he eased back on the bed. CNN was running footage of chaos in and around Dili – the capital of East Timor – as the Indonesia-backed militias attempted to bully the locals out of voting for independence from Jakarta in the ballot scheduled to start in two weeks. Increasingly, the militias were intimidating the United Nations ballot scrutineers, most of whom were Australians. There was an Australian military operation called Spitfire, which was an emergency extraction of Australian and UN personnel from the troubled island at the southern tip of Indonesia. But commanders in the Australian Defence Force would tell you that they weren’t allowed to know the operational planning behind Spitfire – it was being kept a secret in Canberra – so the individual commands were having to plan their own logistics based on rumour.

  As sleep crept up on him the chaotic images flashed across the screen and Mac felt for the poor bastard from the firm who was working in East Timor. Then his eyelids dropped and sleep finally took him.

  They were steaming north for the Davao Gulf underneath the Philippines when the Australian Royal Navy Seahawk helo came into sight and asked permission to land on the Java Princess ’s helipad. Finishing his breakfast, Mac thanked the officers in the wardroom and headed down the rear companionways to the stern decks.

  Inside the helo Mac was given a flight suit and left alone. They made it to HMAS Adelaide in fourteen minutes and Mac spoke with the ship’s intelligence officer while the rest of the officers wiped egg yolk off their plates with their toast. They were going to steam north for another two hours and then fly Mac into Zamboanga City in Mindanao.

  ‘And then?’ asked Mac, sipping on a mug of coffee.

  ‘Beats me – we’re just th
e delivery boys, right?’ shrugged the intel officer, though Mac sensed he knew more than he was saying.

  The navy landed Mac at the air base in Zamboanga just before eleven in the morning, where he was met by a local asset known to Western intelligence as Cubby. The friendly thirty-five-year-old shook Mac’s hand on the tarmac.

  ‘Got a charter for you, Mr Jeffries,’ said Cubby, whose ability to make things happen with minimum fuss was valuable to foreign intelligence services.

  ‘Nice,’ said Mac. He didn’t like to give too much away to people whose loyalty was based on a cheque.

  ‘Yes, Mr Jeffries,’ said the Filipino. ‘Two and quarter hour to Jakarta with government charter flight. Everything good for you, sir.’

  Jakarta was the wrong direction and Mac mulled on it all the way into Halim air base on the outskirts of the vast capital of Indonesia. For the past eight months he’d been working covertly out of Lombok as Don Jeffries, consultant to foreign logging and mining companies, making sure they were greasing the right palms. One of the big problems with trying to exploit the natural resources of places like Borneo, West Papua and Sulawesi was inadvertently channelling your kickback to the wrong person, the other governor, the chief of police rather than the minister for policing.

  Mac’s mission had been to infiltrate the companies, the provincial governments and Jakarta’s military and political structures, and gather intelligence of the type that could never be gained from cocktail parties and Red Cross receptions. He could only do that from a genuine business position, embedded somewhere away from the Aussie Embassy, and his recall to Jakarta meant a big change of some sort. It might even mean a reassignment, and he fantasised that it was a northern hemisphere posting, perhaps even as a ‘declared’ SIS officer in a big embassy. Such postings could be thunderously boring and highly PC – especially in contrast to South-East Asia – but they were where you had to go to earn your management credits and move upwards.

  As Mac followed the other passengers into the air-con of Halim’s military-consular terminal he spotted a woman in her late twenties waiting on the other side of the immigration gate. Using his Alan McQueen passport, Mac eyed the woman while the perfunctory check was made, and concluded she must be there for him: the white blouse, blonde ponytail and blue pencil skirt basically spelled Employee of the Australian Commonwealth.

  ‘G’day,’ said Mac to the woman as he walked through.

  ‘Mr McQueen?’ she asked, putting her hand out to shake and clutching a clipboard with the other. ‘Kate Innes – DFAT.’

  They made small talk as she led him to a red Holden Commodore at the rear of the terminal. ‘So, what’ve you got for me?’ he smiled, buckling up. ‘London? Tokyo?’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, pulling out of the park, ‘further south, I believe.’

  Warming to the mystery, Mac took the envelope she offered and opened it. The Qantas tickets had him flying into Brisbane with a connection to Canberra.

  ‘Must be promotion time, eh Kate?’ he joked as they headed for the freeway.

  ‘Umm,’ she muttered, and Mac saw a blush under her sunnies.

  ‘Not so good?’ said Mac.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr McQueen – my job was to give you the tickets and drive you to Hatta,’ she said, referring to Jakarta’s international airport, Soekarno-Hatta. ‘I don’t really know anything.’

  ‘Be careful with that kind of talk,’ said Mac, trying to make the girl feel better. ‘They’ll make you director-general.’

  She started chuckling and then blushed at the career-limiting nature of the humour. ‘You trying to get me into trouble?’

  ‘I won’t tell a soul,’ said Mac, relaxing into the seat with a sigh, yearning for an armchair in the Qantas Club lounge and three or four very cold beers.

  CHAPTER 4

  Grabbing the cooked breakfast and a glass of orange juice, Mac found a table for two against the wall of the Canberra Hyatt’s dining room and ordered coffee from the waitress. The front page of the Australian had a story about the Prime Minister rejecting an Australian Republic but also rejecting the Queen opening the Olympic Games in Sydney. Flipping through the pages he kept an eye on the Hyatt’s breakfast crowd. Politicians, lawyers, consultants, IT salesmen and all the associated political classes that swarmed around Canberra were mumbling at each other or into mobile phones. It was 7.41 and the daily hunt for taxpayer dollars was about to start.

  Mac bought an overcoat from the men’s store in the Hyatt concourse, then walked across Commonwealth Avenue and through the stands of trees towards old Parliament House, the clear winter air hurting his lungs; they had become acclimatised to the sooty humidity of South-East Asia. The recall to Canberra played on him – it was obviously something to do with the Lok Kok mine, and folded in his pocket, were two pages of plain A4 paper with a field report he’d typed the previous night at the Hyatt’s business centre. Intelligence was a game of information and timing and he wanted his version of events on the record before the 8.30 meeting in the RG Casey building, which housed the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, along with the Aussie SIS.

  Keeping a brisk pace along National Circuit, Mac glimpsed the lake down the cross streets and smelled the rotting winter leaves on the ground. Crossing the street twice to case a slow-moving Ford Falcon that had doubled back, he walked south to John McEwen Crescent and approached the DFAT building entrance from the side and behind the trees in the forecourt. Showing his passport to the security guard at the entrance, he signed for his DFAT lanyard and wandered across the foyer, lost in thought.

  ‘Nice morning for it,’ came a deep male voice.

  Turning, Mac saw his boss, the director of operations for the Asia-Pacific, Tony Davidson, reading the Australian Financial Review on a leather sofa.

  ‘Tony,’ said Mac, walking over and shaking Davidson’s hand.

  ‘Macca – thought we’d have a quick chat on the way up, eh?’

  Walking through a series of corridors until they reached the secure SIS section, Davidson kept it light as he put his card into the designated elevator.

  ‘Gleeson wants to see us – no biggie,’ he said, as the doors opened to reveal two SIS officers locked in terse conversation. They shut their mouths as they saw Davidson looming – it may have been thirty years since he opened the bowling for Western Australia, but at six-five and still built like a country boy, the man had a way of grabbing people’s attention.

  ‘So it’s hardly related – I mean, shit, Tony, what’s the opening of the Olympic Games got to do with our constitution?’ said Mac as a verbal veil, but his mind was spinning: John Gleeson was a deputy director-general at the firm – an executive position second only to the DG – which meant Mac was in serious trouble.

  The operations floor of SIS was already humming as Mac followed Davidson towards Gleeson’s office. The crisis in East Timor and the wider ramifications of the Australia-Indonesia relationship had created a panicked demand for intelligence product from departments such as Prime Minister amp; Cabinet, Foreign Affairs, Trade, Defence, Treasury, Customs and the Australian Federal Police. East Timor was a tiny province with a Portuguese colonial history, but it occupied an island between Flores and northern Australia, and if its ballot for independence from Indonesia disintegrated into a slaughter of civilians, then Australia had to decide not only how to respond, but whether it would agree with Jakarta’s wishes or insist on a universal concept of human rights.

  Murphy’s Law of intelligence held that the specific intel required by government was never available when they needed it, and the reports that so many officers had worked so hard to create were used to prop up computer monitors. There were forty or fifty people on that floor, many of whom had been going all night, synthesising reports and briefings out of known intel and working the firm’s field officers to plug the gaps. And there was still a fortnight until the East Timor ballot. There were times Mac was happy to be a field guy.

  Following Davidson into Gleeson’s corne
r office suite, Mac smiled at the secretary as they were shown into an office that looked north so that the jet which fired water out of Lake Burley-Griffin in the distance seemed to be pumping it straight out of old Parliament House’s roof.

  ‘Alan,’ said John Gleeson, approaching around the hardwood desk.

  ‘Sir,’ said Mac, obeying Gleeson’s gesture to take a seat on the sofa.

  ‘We’re pretty busy up here so I’ll come straight to it,’ said Gleeson, a trim guy in his early fifties who sat on the edge of his desk with one foot on the ground. ‘How did we get ourselves into that fuck-up in West Papua?’ He looked pointedly at Davidson, who sat in a chair against the wall.

  ‘It was one of our provocations,’ said Davidson in his deep WA drawl.

  ‘The OPM operations? That it?’ said Gleeson, annoyed but not losing it.

  ‘That’s it, John. It was my call, it’s not -’

  Raising his hand, Gleeson blinked for two seconds as if managing his stress. ‘Spare me the Clarence Darrow act, okay, Tony? What happened? From the top.’

  ‘We have an asset in OPM,’ said Davidson. ‘We encouraged him to lead a hostage-taking scenario at the Korean-owned Lok Kok mine in the highlands of West Papua while it was in a maintenance cycle.’

  ‘So it was shut down?’