Double back am-3

by Mark Abernethy

  Looking at his G-Shock, he felt a wave of fatigue and wondered if he shouldn’t take a nap while the commandos were still guarding the perimeter.

  Making a single round of the crow’s nest, he made back to his hide and slugged at his water while Blackbird slept. It was amazing how sweet water tasted when it was all you had, he mused. As he replaced the bottle in his rucksack, he noticed the water was slightly milky. Licking at his lips, he realised it actually was sweet – his thirst had nothing to do with it.

  Mind spinning, Mac reached for his rucksack, eyelids starting to droop. Pulling out the first-aid kit, he clocked that one of the benzo boxes had been torn open, the half-empty foil beside it.

  ‘Fuck,’ thought Mac, ‘she’s used half a packet.’

  Darkness closed in from the sides of his vision and a warm, safe sleepiness engulfed him. After nine years of pushing them into people’s mouths, he finally knew what Mogadon felt like.

  The onshore wind felt beautiful on Mac’s face as he opened his eyes, becoming aware of the crashing surf and the night sky through the swishing palms.

  Leaning over him, Beast peered and waved his hand from side to side. ‘Awake, Macca?’ he asked, squinting.

  ‘Think so,’ croaked Mac, his voice sounding like it was coming from a thousand miles away.

  Robbo appeared beside Beast and they pulled him up into a sitting position, Mac’s brain swirling like a top.

  ‘Sorry, boys…’ he started, and then leaned to the side and vomited as Beast jumped back to keep his pants clean.

  He felt foggy in the brain and hungry in the stomach, but mostly Mac was confused. ‘What’s up, guys?’ he asked, wiping his mouth with his shirt front.

  ‘You lost the girl,’ said Robbo, pushing up Mac’s eyeballs and shining his flashlight in them. ‘You were out to it, mate – girl drugged you. Mogadon by the looks of it.’

  Shaking some clarity into his brain, Mac recalled some of the morning’s events and moaned as he realised he’d been duped.

  ‘She gone?’ he slurred.

  ‘No, we caught her,’ said Robbo. ‘But we had to move, and you have to get on the net, re-call the exfil.’

  ‘ I do?’ asked Mac, still waking up.

  Behind Robbo, Blackbird’s hair blew in the sea breeze. Locking eyes with Mac, she gave a shrug that might have been an apology.

  ‘Our position was blown,’ said Robbo. ‘And you’re the one with the exfil call signs – we’ve been waiting for you to wake up.’

  ‘We’ve been made?’ said Mac.

  ‘No, mate – we moved before that,’ said Robbo, offering him another banana.

  ‘How did you know we were blown?’ asked Mac, confused.

  ‘The girl took off with your sat phone.’

  ‘Bitch,’ sighed Mac, despite some begrudging admiration.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Robbo.

  CHAPTER 50

  It was past midday when Mac awoke to the trilling of the Nokia on his beside table. Scrambling for the phone in the dimness of his room at the Natour Bali he listened before hanging up and rolling out of the bed with a groan. The debrief location had been changed from Atkins’ offices to DIA’s headquarters in Denpasar.

  As the shower water pelted his head, Mac willed himself to wake up and get his thoughts together. After delaying the Blackbird exfil by a day, during which he got almost no sleep, he’d then spent another day and night on boats, ships and a helo before hitting his pillow just ten hours earlier. Putting the exhaustion to one side, he thought about what he would say at the debrief and, more importantly, what he wouldn’t say. Having spent four days in East Timor on Operation Totem, he could claim that he and the 4RAR Commandos nailed two of the three objectives: Blackbird snatched and exfiltrated to a secret location for debriefing by Australian SIS and the Pentagon, and Lombok AgriCorp’s secret facility infiltrated, photographed and sampled.

  It was a difficult tasking, and Mac was proud of the Aussies for punching above their weight.

  The secret airfield was not so successful, but Mac wasn’t concerned. It looked like Haryono’s administration offices for his various interests, one of which was making illegal drugs for sale to middle-class fools in Australia and Japan. The actual set-up was obviously an agricultural spraying depot, probably for mosquitos. If the Indonesians wanted to conduct secret DDT programs in contravention of the UN’s ban on outdoor spraying, then it was fine with Mac – DDT being the cheapest and most powerful enhancer of quality of life for anyone who lived in malarial zones, regardless of what non-malarial greenies in London and San Francisco said about it.

  There were loose ends that niggled at Mac’s mind, but they weren’t enough to ruin his morning. The underground facility at Lombok, for instance, didn’t strike him as being a drug lab. Mac had never seen a methamphetamine factory, or a cocaine lab, but he’d heard they smelled of powerful solvents and he assumed they didn’t include live testing programs. After his debrief, he would be eased out of Totem, but he might ask around – see how others interpreted that strange underground world.

  Making a cup of green tea, he found himself thinking about Blackbird. She was no longer his problem – he’d been sent to find Australia’s hottest spy and he’d done it. But it was an anticlimax to risk so much only to discover that she was ambivalent at best, treacherous at worst.

  Seeing the time, Mac stood to go and noticed his rucksack. The American courier at the base behind Denpasar’s Ngurah Rai Airport had been so insistent about getting Mac’s samples as soon he stepped off the helo that she hadn’t asked for the return of DIA’s digital Nikon.

  Lifting it from the bag, Mac inspected the camera’s damaged data-jack area and had an idea.

  Scanning the street outside the Natour, Mac grabbed the fourth cab, waving the first three away as soon as they stopped.

  Giving an address four blocks south of Puputan Square, Mac settled in the back seat of the air-conditioned Camry and sat directly behind the driver so he could clock the bloke’s face in the rear-vision mirror.

  ‘Still the dry weather – good for you, sir,’ said the driver, a well-presented man in his early thirties.

  ‘Better than the monsoon?’ asked Mac, smiling.

  ‘No good for tourist,’ said the bloke, shaking his head slowly. ‘They get wet and crazy, then go home and say Bali is wet and crazy.’

  ‘That’s about right,’ said Mac, chuckling as the street stalls and crowds flashed by in his window.

  Flipping the driver a US fifty-dollar note as they stopped, Mac asked him to drive to the Golden Lantern and wait outside for ten minutes.

  ‘For sure, sir,’ said the driver, eyes looking at a week’s profit in one fare. ‘I wait an hour for you.’

  ‘Ten minutes is fine, thanks, champ,’ said Mac, alighting with his businessman’s satchel and casing the street.

  Walking back along the market street, he used the profusion of traders and locals to find a tail. Deciding he was clear, Mac ducked down an alley connecting the market street with a more sedate avenue, and counted seven shops before slipping into Bali Vision World, an inconspicuous camera store.

  At the counter, a small Javanese man with neat features looked over his half-glasses and frowned.

  ‘You not meant to be here, Mr Richard,’ he said, whipping off his glasses and walking around the counter to meet Mac in front of the camera bag section. ‘I not do any of that no more.’

  ‘Calm down, Set,’ said Mac, modulating his voice. ‘I had no idea this was your shop, mate – just needed some images transferred.’

  ‘You are bad liar, Mr Richard,’ said Setawan Posi, one of the best electronic-surveillance technicians Mac had ever worked with.

  ‘It’ll take five minutes,’ said Mac, rustling a US hundred-dollar note in his hand. ‘Swear to God.’

  Set put Mac’s Nikon on his work bench behind the counter area and, with some difficulty, opened the hatch that held the memory card.

  ‘You should not drop camera
, Mr Richard,’ said Set as he pulled out the card. ‘They do not like it.’

  Inserting the card into another identical Nikon, Set asked for the device they were going to download into.

  Handing over his laptop, Mac watched as Set searched along his junk-covered workshop walls for a cable that would marry the Nikon to the laptop. Coming back with a beige connector, Set declared it a success and powered up the computer.

  ‘We put it on the hard drive, okay?’ he said, opening a file. ‘What you want to call it?’

  ‘Call it “Mickey”,’ said Mac.

  The downloads took twenty minutes and as Mac watched the images from Operation Totem flash up while the on-screen bar showed them being downloaded, Set made tea.

  ‘How’s business?’ asked Mac, sipping jasmine tea.

  ‘Better than the other one,’ said Set, lifting his mangled left hand. The smallest three fingers had been badly broken at some point and Set could no longer make a fist with them.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Mac.

  ‘I was working for the BAKIN in Jakarta, right?’ said Set. ‘I put camera and bug in this Korean bank, but then I am caught, right?’

  ‘Caught by who?’ asked Mac.

  ‘By army intelligence,’ sighed Set. ‘They tell me the generals own this bank with the Koreans, and they… well, you know, okay?’

  An image on the laptop screen caught Mac’s eye as it downloaded. Focusing on it, his breath caught slightly. It was one of his shots of the airfield where the spraying booms were stored, where they’d seen Haryono getting out of his helicopter. The glare that had made it impossible to see the registrations of the Black Hawk helicopters parked in front of the admin building was clear through the Nikon lens.

  Peering at the screen, Mac found himself smiling. The Black Hawks’ registrations all started with ‘9V’ – the sign for Singapore.

  ‘Can we zoom in on that one?’ asked Mac, as the image downloaded and was replaced by another.

  Set grabbed the laptop, found the stored image and enlarged it.

  ‘The tail section of that helo in the front,’ said Mac, watching as the registration came to life.

  ‘That’s as far it goes,’ said Set, as it zoomed to the point where the image quality degraded.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Mac, slumping a little in his chair and wondering what it meant. The full registration was 9V 1124F – Pik Berger’s surviving gunship.

  ***

  The coffee machine was working overtime in DIA’s front office in Denpasar as Mac was ushered through the security checks. Grabbing a mug of black coffee, he made for the briefing room and was taken aback as he found Tony Davidson and Jim sitting at a table, looking morose.

  ‘Thought you guys would be debriefing Blackbird right now?’ said Mac, sliding his satchel onto the table and taking a seat as Simon joined them.

  ‘We were,’ said Jim, sheepish.

  ‘In Australia or Singapore – but not here,’ said Mac.

  ‘Tony?’ said Jim, deflecting the question.

  ‘What’s the drum, guys?’ said Mac.

  ‘The debrief was in Darwin,’ said Davidson. ‘And that was a nice job grabbing Blackbird.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mac, looking to Jim and back to Davidson.

  ‘Yeah, but we got her from Darwin air base, drove her into the city, and there was a crowd of diplomats and lawyers waiting for us down on Cavanagh Street,’ said Davidson.

  ‘But -’ said Mac.

  ‘Indonesian diplomats and lawyers,’ said Davidson with a growl. ‘They pulled the consular crap and they drove away with Blackbird in the back seat.’

  ‘But can they -?’

  ‘Yes they can,’ said Simon. ‘She’s an Indonesian national apprehended in Indonesian territory and illegally transported across an international border.’

  ‘Blackbird went along with this?’ asked Mac.

  ‘She didn’t fight it,’ said Davidson, rubbing his face.

  ‘Bottom line,’ said Jim, lighting a cigarette, ‘she’s gone and we have a leak.’

  Mac told the truth: he didn’t know where Blackbird was being rendered and he had no motive to reveal her destination even if he had known. No one on HMAS Sydney had asked any untoward questions and the 4RAR Commandos didn’t care less.

  The next part was harder. ‘Perhaps I should have told you this earlier,’ said Mac, feeling stupid. ‘She tried to escape at the exfil point. She drugged me with Mogadon and the Commandos rounded her up, found she’d taken the sat phone. That’s why we were twenty-four hours delayed on her delivery.’

  ‘We looked at the phone,’ said Simon. ‘But the only calls were to us.’

  Mac took a closer look at Simon – he had steady eyes and an unmoving face. A period of silence followed, which suggested to Mac he was probably already under surveillance by DIA. He’d kicked up a fuss with Atkins, he’d proven himself a loose cannon with his Bongo partnership, and someone was bound to have made a comment about Mac’s personal interest in Jessica Yarrow, possibly Gillian Baddely.

  The rest of the meeting was perfunctory: Mac took the participants through his journey, the airfield, the booms, the tanks on the helos and Haryono’s appearance. The underground partition of Lombok AgriCorp, the inhalation chambers filled with people, one side dead, the other looking sick but still alive. He mentioned the Falintil engagement at Lombok, the fire at the facility and the fact he’d asked the guerrillas to disrupt the mule lines of US dollars that were being walked across the border from West Timor to the airfield.

  Jim responded with an analysis of the samples taken from Lombok: they were an advanced type of pneumonia, or SARS.

  ‘Nothing new,’ said Jim with a shrug, slightly too casual.

  ‘It’s the SARS vaccine?’ said Mac.

  ‘It’s the same disease they’re cultivating,’ corrected Jim.

  ‘Have a look at the pics,’ said Mac, taking the Nikon from his satchel and handing it to Jim. ‘Like to know what you think.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jim, taking the camera. ‘So let’s talk about Blackbird.’

  ‘Let’s,’ said Mac, grabbing at coffee.

  ‘Snatch went okay?’ asked Davidson, leaning forward.

  ‘Yep,’ said Mac. ‘The 63 grabbed her from the Kopassus compound in Maliana, we took her across the island and she was cooperative and moved with the rest of us.’

  ‘She talk?’ asked Davidson, focusing.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Mac.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I overstepped with the questions, I think,’ said Mac, trying to remember the point at which he’d lost her. ‘I caught her in a lie – she claimed that no one at Kopassus had asked her if she’d ever copied a file at army HQ.’

  ‘Unlikely they’d leave that off their list,’ said Jim.

  ‘What I said,’ said Mac. ‘She got testy so I asked her why she was seen with Benni Sudarto. She said that wasn’t true and I said her sister had told me.’

  ‘Nice,’ approved Jim.

  ‘From there she admitted to being a double agent: recruited by the Indonesian Army to work at HQ in Dili, then recruited by us on the promise of sending her to an Aussie university, and then turned by Benni Sudarto to work for Kopassus.’

  ‘What was Benni’s deal?’ asked Davidson.

  ‘Do what we ask or your family suffers – in front of you.’

  ‘Love that Kopassus approach,’ said Davidson.

  ‘She said she’d never heard of Operasi Boa and had never copied a file on Boa,’ said Mac.

  ‘You believe her?’ asked Davidson.

  Thinking back to the conversation again, Mac took his time. ‘No, I don’t, Tony. I think she knows what Boa is.’

  ‘Any evidence?’ asked Simon.

  ‘No,’ said Mac.

  ‘So she did copy it?’ asked Jim.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Mac. ‘But if she did, it’s not worth her while to let us know about it. They got to her, mate – they got to her bad.’

&n
bsp; CHAPTER 51

  Walking in the sunshine, Mac wrestled with a few aspects of the DIA operation that were not adding up for him. He wondered why Jim had pulled that too-casual deflection of the samples from the underground rooms of Lombok. It perhaps wasn’t a complete fabrication, but Jim hadn’t wanted to dwell on the samples Mac and Didge had risked their lives for. Jim was also surprisingly calm about what Mac and Didge had seen down there – not a drug factory but a human-testing lab. Even given DIA’s famous intelligence-exclusion policy when dealing with allies, Mac had expected more. An explanation perhaps. There was a disconnect between the drug lord, Lee Wa Dae, and the vaccine program at Lombok: the two didn’t marry. Yet, the airfield where Pik Berger’s helicopters visited Ishy Haryono did seem to be joined to the Koreans by the bags of money arriving there. It looked like a drug network, not something that the Pentagon would pursue with such vigour.

  Moving east on Hasanudin, Mac walked a conservative hundred metres behind Jim. Mac had bought a dark jacket, was wearing sunglasses, and he hadn’t been made as they moved towards the park at the river.

  Mac’s biggest concern was with the underground facility at Lombok. He now replayed in his mind the conversation he’d had with Joao. The Falintil commander had told him the village clearances on the south coast had been traced to both the death camp near Memo and the Lombok facility. They were the same program, run by the same people, according to Falintil, who Mac recognised as the most authoritative intelligence source in East Timor. Testing Falintil’s intel and motives, Mac couldn’t see how they were deceiving or provoking Aussie intelligence. Joao had had no idea who Mac really was on the visit to the death camp and he’d seemed prepared to shoot Mac at the Lombok site.

  If the people at the death camp and the people in the inhalation chambers were part of the same program of vaccine-testing, thought Mac, why didn’t any of the corpses at the death camp have evidence of an inoculation? Bongo had checked a cross-section of the bodies, which were naked. He’d said they were clear of any marking or punctures – unlikely for a bunch of people being forcibly injected with a SARS vaccine.