Second Strike am-2

by Mark Abernethy

  Mac zipped his pack and made for the back door of Saba’s. The bodyguard closed the locker and let him out into the back lane, and as Mac turned to say thanks the steel reinforced door shut in his face.

  The mango was good and the coffee was great, but another twenty hours of sleep would have been even better. Mac took his time and tried to think through his day. Around him the energy of the Powering Asia conference had evaporated with the shootings of the previous arvo and only stragglers from think tanks and die-hards from the UN made up the numbers.

  He tried to get straight what he was chasing and what he actually wanted to do about it. The Hassan crew seemed to have stepped into the old Dr A.Q. Khan networks and taken them on another tangent.

  Did Mac want revenge on these people? Was it about his pride? Or was there a greater danger to Australia that presented itself out of the whole mess? Was there unfi nished business with these people? Could he claim to Davidson that he still hadn’t got to the bottom of NIME?

  If Canberra really wanted to know the end-user of Bennelong’s enrichment codes, then Mac only had the shell of that answer. He believed he had enough to say that the end-user was the A.Q. Khan illegal nuclear network. Khan himself was out of commission – apparently – having been put under house arrest for a few days in

  ‘04 only to be pardoned. It seemed that making an estimated US$200 million from selling uranium-enrichment equipment to Libya, Iraq and North Korea was all a misunderstanding.

  Khan had started back in the 1970s when, fresh out of university, he had joined an engineering fi rm in the Netherlands. He’d been tailed by Dutch intelligence after he had made too many inquiries at UCN, an engineering company that built high-speed centrifuges that enriched uranium.

  Khan had suddenly left the Netherlands in 1975 and landed back in his home country with blueprints of the German P-1 centrifuge, stolen from UCN. The Pakistani government built the Engineering Research Laboratory for Khan, and by 1978 ERL had built a P-1 centrifuge and enriched its own uranium.

  Pakistan became the Americans’ new best friend after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and so during the 1980s Khan’s ERL sold its centrifuges to Iran and Iraq, all the while developing a P-2 centrifuge that could enrich uranium in half the time of the P-1.

  In the 1990s Khan changed his company to KRL – Khan Engineering Laboratory – after beating charges laid in the Netherlands for nuclear espionage. He entered a joint weapons-development program with North Korea in which Pakistan would get its own version of the No Dong Korean missile delivery systems and North Korea would get its own weapons-grade uranium facility. He also formed a partnership with several businessmen who would do the sales and shipping of Khan’s goods. One of them was B.A.S. Tahir, the Sri Lankan who by late 2000 was operating out of a British-owned Dubai company called Gulf Technical Industries. Indonesian intelligence believed that another Khan operative was Hassan Ali, whose main client in South-East Asia was Jemaah Islamiyah.

  Australia’s interest in this development was compounded by Khan’s use of a Malaysian hi-tech engineering company called SCOPE to build the gas centrifuges, magnet baffl es, vacuum devices and centrifuge casings that were being shipped to Libya and Iraq as drilling parts for the oil and gas industries.

  Khan’s network pursued enormous, brazen contracts during the 1990s. In one deal to supply more than ten thousand enrichment centrifuges to Libya, Indian intelligence – which had been onto Khan from day one – estimated the transaction to be worth in excess of US$100 million.

  In the early 2000s, when Mac was largely posted in Indonesia and the Philippines, the attitude of spooks from Japan and India had hardened towards the Americans because of their protection of the Khan networks. It reached an all-time low in 2003, when the Indian government took their complaints to the US State Department and the Americans refused to pull the plug on Khan, citing ‘insuffi cient evidence’ of illegal nuclear transactions.

  Mac looked around the large breakfast area and wondered how the Israelis and Indonesians had picked up on Hassan’s connection to Khan while the Aussies and Yanks had missed it. He thought back to those fi rst awful hours after the bombings in Kuta. Both Ari Scharansky and Freddi Gardjito had known there was a pro crew who’d done the Sari Club, and both Mossad and BAIS had the Hassan gang under surveillance at the Kuta Puri hotel. Hassan was to South-East Asia what Tahir was to the Middle East – Khan’s operations manager. Trouble was, after A.Q. Khan had confessed to his dealings live on Pakistani TV in 2004, Tahir was questioned and Gulf Technical Industries was exposed, none of that attention had fallen on Hassan Ali. He was still operating and in the business of building uranium-enrichment capacity for his clients, possibly Burma, Taiwan and Yemen. Maybe a disgruntled former Soviet republic in central Asia.

  There was one fi nal problem that Mac was trying to get his fi nger on. In the early months of 2004, the Americans had told Khan to shut down his network. At the same time they’d got Khan’s biggest client – Libya – to swear off its nuclear weapons program in exchange for a massive injection of cash from the US taxpayer into Gaddafi ‘s conventional military. Those two events had crystallised in February

  ‘04, but in March a ship called China entered Tripoli. When the CIA and Atomic Energy Agency inspectors boarded the ship, they found only one container of centrifuges – which was very bad news for the world’s intelligence agencies, since Libya had paid for more than fi fty containers of the enrichment machines.

  Mac’s breathing caught slightly. If you had forty-nine containers of centrifuges, they’d be useless without the algorithms and control systems that ran them. Mac breathed out. He wasn’t looking for a few shooters, he was looking for an illegal nuclear weapons program, and it seemed it was right on Australia’s doorstep.

  CHAPTER 38

  Mac fumed as he pocketed his phone. Davidson still wasn’t answering and, while it wasn’t totally unusual to have a controller off the air for a day, it was annoying. Davidson was in start-up mode for his new economic operation team and he might be touring the world, thought Mac, trying to get new assets in place and contracts organised. Mac had probably been the easy tasking, but other agents wouldn’t be so easy to bring back from civvie life.

  Mac left another message on Davidson’s voicemail – no details, but a request to get back to him. Mac didn’t trust even the ‘secure’ voicemail used by ASIS. It was just a piece of digital code sitting on a server somewhere.

  Next, Mac called Joe Imbruglia, now ASIS station chief in Kuala Lumpur and as cranky as always.

  ‘Yep,’ he answered.

  ‘It’s me,’ said Mac.

  ‘Shit, McQueen – how are you?’

  ‘Not bad for an old bloke.’

  ‘Not too old to be back in the fi eld.’

  ‘You heard?’ asked Mac.

  ‘Spies, mate – we’re a nosey bunch.’

  They chatted briefl y. Word of Diane’s shooting had made the rounds very quickly – the Western intelligence circuit in South-East Asia was actually quite small – and Mac assured him he was staying out of trouble, that it was a freak thing.

  As the banter died away Mac decided to give it a shot.

  ‘Joe, remember Handmaiden?’ He tried to make it casual. ‘I fi led that report from ‘02? We got Akbar but then his own people shot him, and we had him pegged as part of the Hassan gang?’

  ‘Sure, I remember,’ said Joe.

  ‘So, was Hassan ever put on an active watch?’

  Joe met the query with silence.

  ‘I mean, have we got people on him?’ Mac pushed. ‘Our friends?’

  ‘Mate!’ laughed Joe. ‘Then I’d have to kill ya.’

  ‘Look,’ said Mac, ‘I just need to know where he was last seen, known residences, corporate fronts, regular travel routes – usual shit.’

  Joe let out a breath, perhaps expecting this call. ‘Shit, mate, this isn’t the OK Corral.’

  ‘It’s not like that -‘

  ‘Sounds like it to
me, mate.’ Joe didn’t sound angry, just sad.

  ‘I’m back in, mate,’ said Mac, unsure of his exact status if he wasn’t dealing through Davidson.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Joe. ‘Let me -‘

  Mac could hear Joe mumbling his encouragement for the right fi les to come up.

  ‘Well holy shit,’ said Joe. ‘McQueen, Alan Francis. They’ve got you as an IO, a mid-rank.’

  ‘And they are never wrong, eh Joe?’ It was a long-held joke between Joe and Mac that whoever they were, they were mighty smart to be, at the same time, Jewish-Zionists, illuminati WASPs and Vatican bankers.

  ‘Okay, mate,’ said Joe, sounding conciliatory. ‘Gimme half an hour to get this stuff off my desk and I’ll get back to you on Hassan, okay?’

  ‘You’re a champion, Joe.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Joe Imbruglia, and he hung up.

  Mac grabbed a bottle of Vittel from the mini-bar fridge and sat back at the table, looking out over the city. He was stuck in Jakarta and couldn’t even contact his station chief at the embassy. He thought about the last time he’d seen Martin Atkins, Joe’s counterpart in Jakkers.

  Blue-blood, protestant Atkins – the Glory Boy from Geelong Grammar

  – who had called Mac a ‘cowboy’, and Mac had responded that at least he rode the horse, not the other way around. The argument had erupted at the nineteenth hole after an inter-embassy golf day with the Americans, and Atkins had to be restrained after Mac’s comment.

  The thing that had stunned Mac that afternoon was Garvs taking Atkins’ side, even suggesting Mac should call it a night. Garvs had become the ASIS deputy to Atkins shortly after the incident and Mac knew that Jakarta station was no longer his people. It worked like that in intelligence, and Mac knew cops and soldiers who claimed that it worked exactly that way in their professions too.

  The process had worked in reverse for Joe and Mac. Joe had come in from the fi eld at a time when Mac was bristling at bureaucracy and had decided to cop an attitude with his new controller in Manila.

  Having worked corporate and embassy covers in Beijing, Taipei, Seoul and Tokyo, Joe wasn’t about to be cowed by some smartarse from Queensland, and they’d clashed on a daily basis. That had changed on Christmas Eve ‘06. The embassy crowd in that city had become sneeringly atheist, and when Joe’s wife had gone back to Sydney with the kids for Christmas, Joe didn’t want to be the only God Botherer going off to mass. So Mac had asked Joe if he wanted to share a jeepny to the service. They’d gone out for dinner and then gone drinking in Angeles after the mass, telling each other far too much about themselves – so much that they couldn’t be anything but friends afterwards.

  Joe’s stories were hilarious: Japanese watchers putting eight guys on a detail just to follow you to the toilet; the Koreans couldn’t be got with fl attery, but paranoia worked wonders; how the Chinese MSS always softened up a bloke with a pretty girl and a lot of booze. I swear to God, mate – if she’s really sexy and wants to drink whisky all night, you’ve been made!

  Mac’s abiding memory of that night was standing in the stinking hot cathedral, everyone in white trop shirts, fans going in front of faces like a fl ock of birds, and the congregation singing ‘Silent Night’ in Tagalog. That night Mac had become aware of how Italians could cry, but with a smile on their face.

  Mac slugged on the cold fl uid and composed himself, then called Jenny. Her mobile went straight to voicemail and he breathed out. He had promised himself that if he took Davidson’s offer and went back into the game, he’d do everything he could to shield Jenny and Rachel from any fear or danger that he might be feeling. The unwritten rule of marrying cops was that you became their safety zone, the calm centre of the maelstrom. That was Mac’s role and he knew Jenny would have problems going back into her job if she felt her husband couldn’t do a simple bit of due diligence on a loan guarantee without people getting shot.

  There was also Sarah. He was going to acknowledge his daughter, be a dad to her. And he was going to tell Jen. It wasn’t the conversation that husbands wanted to have with their wives, but Sarah wasn’t going to be swept under a rug – she was entitled to be a proud member of the McQueen family. Mac just didn’t know if he could do it now, in Jakkers, while Diane was lying in a hospital bed and he was trying to work out what to do about it.

  Deciding to check on Diane, he called down to the desk and booked Edwin. The car would be available at midday, which gave him thirty-nine minutes to check the contents of the yellow envelope sitting on the desk in front of him.

  As he picked up the envelope, he promised himself not to do anything stupid. There were ASIS, AFP and ADF guys in Jakarta, trained and tasked to take on people like Hassan Ali and his gang of psychos.

  Upending the envelope, he carefully shook its contents onto the wooden desk. He sorted through his copies of the papers that Mac, Johnny and Huck had found in the burnt building on an old airfi eld in Sumatra. Freddi had taken the originals and given Mac a bunch of photocopies. The seven sheets of paper were in Urdu and Farsi and Bahasa and they meant nothing to Mac. They were grids and tables and paragraphs broken into numbered sequences.

  He leafed through to a piece of white A4 paper with some words and numbers that Toni Lucas had scribbled on it in black ink. Toni Lucas had been in the AFP’s forward command post in Kuta and he remembered how she almost threw the paper at him and told him to leave her the fuck alone. A CSIRO scientist, she’d been seconded to the AFP for the Kuta investigation – Operation Alliance – and she’d grown tired of Mac’s questions and constant prodding for more information.

  She was running double-check analysis of all the swabs being run through the mobile bomb lab by the investigations teams. Toni had been overworked and distressed at the scenario – the smell of Kuta was becoming strong, and even with face masks and burning incense it was disturbing.

  Mac had got back from northern Sumatra with more questions than answers about the Kuta bomb blasts and he’d clumsily used his position with Foreign Affairs to go poking into areas he really shouldn’t have. He’d lasted three days in Kuta before someone had realised that he was pursuing a parallel investigation, at which point calls were made and Joe Imbruglia was giving him the hook. He’d never confi rmed it but he always suspected that it was his old mate Garvs who decided to get Mac out of there. Garvs had become part of the program very quickly in ASIS. He didn’t have the same fi eld talents as Mac but he was excellent at sensing what higher-ups expected of him. As far as spy organisations went, Mac and Garvs were both known as ‘reliables’. It was just that they were reliable in two totally different ways.

  Written on the piece of paper in an educated cursive script was: 15/10 water, Sari Crater3.53+-17

  15/10 water, Denpasar roof tank‹0.13

  There was nothing else on the page. But he remembered the question he had pestered Toni about, a question he only got away with because she was so busy and he kept making her laugh. The question had been, What are the tritium levels for the Legian blasts?

  He’d remembered Viktor telling him how tritium was one of the few things left behind in a plutonium mini-nuke explosion; the plutonium used in a mini-nuclear device wouldn’t leave radiation of the type detected with a Geiger counter but it would leave triated water, tritium returning to its preferred water-borne state.

  Mac thought back to that day and remembered how Toni would not release any of her printouts. The MOU with the Indonesians had specifi cally precluded any ‘wider linkages’ than those sanctioned, and the scientists stuck to tests for anfo, C4 and potassium chlorate, the bomb materials of choice for Asian bombers.

  Toni’s analysis had revealed signifi cantly raised levels of triated water in the Sari Club crater, compared with the ‘control’ water of a house water tank in Denpasar.

  He set Toni’s paper aside and looked at the last one, a partially burnt piece of A4 that he had never shown Freddi. He could still smell that airfi eld with its whiffs of ash and fi re, and
he stared at it as he slugged on the Vittel. The handwritten note said N W, which could have meant anything. It might have had nothing to do with the Hassan crew or the Kuta bombings. He’d asked around about it

  – asked Indons, Americans, Aussies, Malaysians – anyone who might have even a faint idea. The only thing that came back was that if you had Pakistanis involved, and N W, then it probably referred to the North-West Frontier. Which hadn’t helped Mac at all.

  Mac and Edwin were fi ve minutes away from MMC Hospital when Jenny phoned back. It was good to hear her voice but when she put her Nokia down for Rachel to say her bit, his daughter went silent. All he could hear was Jen whispering, ‘ Say hi to Daddy, say hi.’

  ‘So Mr Macca,’ said Jenny, sounding cheerful as she got back on the line, ‘that wasn’t you in Jakkers, right?’

  ‘Wasn’t me what?’ asked Mac, confused.

  ‘You didn’t get my voicemails?’

  ‘No, actually, I -‘

  ‘There was a shooting up there yesterday, remember?’ said Jen.

  Mac groaned inwardly. ‘Umm, yeah – but it’s, you know -‘ He wasn’t going to discuss it, hadn’t even had a chance to digest it properly himself.

  ‘Can’t talk?’

  ‘Umm, yeah, Jen -‘ he said, glancing at a box of chocolates and bunch of fl owers sitting in the back seat.

  Jen was inquisitive and not always in a good way. ‘I’m hearing there’re two Australians dead and a British national in hospital,’ she said in a tone that made Mac cringe.

  ‘Yeah, mate,’ he said, going for casual. ‘I’m on my way out to MMC right now.’

  ‘The Brit is a female, right?’

  Mac felt like one of her suspects and he was about to tell her who it was but she stole the moment. ‘It’s Diane, right? Diane Ellison?’

  Mac breathed out. ‘Yeah – she took two bullets.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Jenny, in that way that women say okay when it’s not okay. ‘So don’t tell me, she was the wife, right?’